The Video Lens should perform more like a video library

[Alexander Langanke]

Right now, the video lens only displays videos of any kind listed by name.

For the future I would love to see this evolve into someting more like a media library.

I imagine opening the lens an seeing different scopes for "movies", "tv-shows", "other" and "online videos".

The Movies and Tv-Shows scope would then display the Movie poster or DVD-Cover etc. Right clicking woul open up the preview with a summary of the show or the movie. Such information, including the Cover-Art should be scraped via IMDB or TVDB.

Clicking on one of the TV Shows would open up the show and allow you to choose the season (again with album art) etc.

Perhaps some of the code from Ubuntu TV could be used?

[David Callé (davidc3)]

Until recently, a bug in Unity prevented the integration of such scopes in the lens, but many new Unity features (such as Previews) will be available for it in Ubuntu 12.10, and the next cycle should also offer a new round of features for the lens (thanks to the work done by the Ubuntu TV team). Some of these will probably be available as third party scopes in the Software Center in the next few monhs.

Regarding movie posters and dvd covers, a major issue is the lack of a standard video metadata framework for Ubuntu (without installing big pieces of software such as XBMC ). Some scopes (such as the experimental "Rotten Tomatoes" one) do this their own way, but the Grilo framework being worked on by Gnome should globally solve this and be used by the lens (and Ubuntu TV).

[Alexander Langanke (alexlanganke)]

That sounds very interesting and promising. Thank you for your time!