RMVOD v0.9.1 is HERE! It's a DOOZIE!

 Hi folks!

So, I've created a new tag on the RIBBBITmedia VideoOnDemand code repo, and this one undoes the whole "feature complete for release 1.0" thing.  Many new features.  Oops!

In this tag you'll find several new features.  Notably:

0) Config file.  I'd planned for some time to implement this, and this seemed a really good time to do it.

1) Recommendations (Recs).  This is a new tab in the RMVOD screen, which provides a "carousel-like" interface for browsing artifacts based on connections to viewing trends on the server.  The Recs interface shows artifact details in a floating box when the artifact's image is clicked.  For TV Series artifacts, options are presented to start playing the series from the beginning or to select a season, and browse episodes to select one to play.  Recommendations are cached on the server and expire after a period of days set in the API's config file.  There is a "Refresh Recs" link on the Settings tab to force a refresh of the recommendations.  Recommendations functionality requires a new table in the database.  See README.txt in the root of the code tree for details on upgrading an existing system to support this feature.  For systems where the DB is hosted on the same box as the API, and the box is really-low resource... like a RasPi 2 something even less capable... Recommendations should be disabled in the API's config file.

2) Quick Search Links.  This is a new set of links on the "List/Search" tab which present the lists of artifacts from the Recs tab in the familiar list format.  This also depends on Recs being enabled on the server.

3) "Last Search" display.  Now, when you execute a search, the "search factors" will be displayed below the artifact list to remind you of what you searched for, whether the search is single factor or multi-factor.

4) "Play fullscreen" option.  This is a checkbox on the Settings tab which asks the player to initiate playback in full-screen mode.  This currently only works for playback initiated by the user clicking the artifact to initiate playback.  When playing a series, the second and later episodes played will not be in full-screen.  This is a known issue related to a security feature in popular browsers.  I'm looking for a work around, but for now, it eludes me.

5) "Populate Episode Details" link. In the Artifact Details box for a TV Series, at the bottom, to the right of the "Edit" and "Associate Episodes" links, there is now a "Populate Episode Details" link which initiates an operation on the server to query IMDbAPI for the details relating to the "series" artifact and each of the episode artifacts.  This requires that the series artifact already has episodes associated with it, and has its "imdbid" value set appropriately.  The use of this feature requires a "key" for the API which can be obtained by visiting here https://www.omdbapi.com/ and setting the key value in the API's config file.

Download the latest "stable" code here:

https://github.com/taobear68/rmvod/releases/tag/v0.9.1

RMVOD, upstream data, and new features

 I don't know if this is permanent or not... but there definitely seems to be a *period* of development arriving, where the big, exciting features of which users would be readily aware are fading out, and it's more... stuff administrators would appreciate.  

I was recently in contact with Brian who maintains the OMDb API (https://www.omdbapi.com/) which allows weirdos like me to have a source of "Movie Database" content available via a simple API.  I've supported him (nominally) on Patreon for a while... you can access the api for free, but you're throttled to some number of requests per day, but if you sign up for his Patron, you can get many more requests per day.  Recently my script that I'd written to scrape "Movie Database" data from the Internet (not using Brian's API) has been throwing errors, and I think it's because the "Movie Database" I'd been hitting for TV Series Episode data didn't like getting scraped by a bot... so, they started sending me 403s.  

That's when I reached out to Brian and asked him if there was a way to get series episode data from his API... and almost immediately, he was like, "You mean *this*?" with a link to  page outlining an as-yet unpublished endpoint on the API which returns the Episodes for a Season of a TV Series.  Well... I was over the moon... I said, yes, that appears to be just the thing.  Then I tried it out, and discovered there appeared to be a bug in the way it linked episodes to the "series" entity.  I tried it out a couple different ways, made some notes, and told Brian I think I found a bug.  He dove right in and within a few days, the "unpublished" series data endpoint was working properly.

So, now, I have a "one button" solution in the RMVOD UI for populating all the data for the Episodes of a TV Series.  The thing is, this feature is not something "normal viewers" are going to care about or use.  From the standpoint of an administrator... the person who has to maintain a local instance of RMVOD, this is a boon.  To someone only concerned with "What is there to watch", this feature doesn't matter.  I think this is the character of features that will be coming down the pipe for the foreseeable future.

There will be a new "tag" coming soon, which will include the feature outlined above.  If you have an existing set-up, the new features will require a DB update (adding a table), which is not automated.  If you're incomfortable running SQL from the command line and you don't have an instance of RMVOD set up, then you might want to wait, as a fresh install will have the new table.  

The current tag/release is here:  https://github.com/taobear68/rmvod/releases/tag/v0.9.0 if you want to give it a try.