What do you do with a Mac Mini, assorted software and a very large DVD library? Why, you build a home entertainment network of course. And to show you just how easy it can be, Ara Derderian and Braden Russell walked listeners through it step by step in the HDTV Guys podcast last March. After the podcast we received lots of great feedback from listeners who got turned on to DVDpedia and its full screen view. Most of that feedback found its way into version 4 of DVDpedia and its redesigned full screen view: filters, multi disc/episode launching, switching collections and a details view. In response to that the HDTV Guys did another podcast about their move to version 4 of DVDpedia on their Mini Video Server. Once again, the feedback was great (including multi-page annotated PDFs that we are still working our way through) and quite a few people have taken Ara’s and Braden’s idea and implemented it in their own home.
For version 4.1 we have taken care of the more frequent requests from HDTV listeners: inclusion of the summary in the details view and multiple lines for the starring information. We had to keep something for future versions so multi-row browsing petitioned by Ara did not make it into this version. We had mentioned to the HDTV Guys that we’re testing out scrolling to make long summaries fit on the details screen. Turns out that reading text that’s not sitting still takes Jedi powers.The biggest request though was customization. Users wanted different information in their details: some wanted just the summary, others were missing the aspect ratio and video format and some didn’t even want the title as they can tell from the cover image. So there was only one solution: let the users choose the fields and their order. Twenty different fields or 550 summary words or a mixture of both fit on the full screen view details page, so get customizing!
Thanks to Braden and Ara for using DVDpedia in their Mac Mini media server as well as all the HDTV listeners that checked out our program. If you have an HDTV and connecting devices to each other is your thing, I highly recommend their show. Like any respectable podcast you can subscribe to it on the iTunes store.