by stevenhanna6 on Fri Apr 01, 2005 6:36 pm #
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Setting up demos and trailers before a movie
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<h3>Demos and Trailers before a movie</h3>
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TheaterTek Users
<p></p>Please note. There are currently 2 ways to launch a movie the new way and the old way. The new way is the default way xlobby will try to launch TT, if this isn't working for you then you should try the old way.To activate the old way, you simply create a text file called "theatertek.txt" in your xlobby directory. That's it, now xlobby will use the SUBST method. The new way should work if you have the latest and greatest version of theatertek.
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<p></p>First off you should have some demos or trailers to play before your movie. Demos are usually those Dolby Digital and DTS intros you see before a movie. Trailers usually refers to a short clip about a movie. You can download some vob format demos from here to get started.
<p></p><a class='urllink' href='http://www.cinenow.com/us/vobtrailer.php3'>http://www.cinenow.com/us/vobtrailer.php3</a>
<p></p>If your looking for the latest movie trailers the best place is to download them from apple. I might write an auto downloader to download these trailers from within xlobby later on but for now you will have to save them to your hard drive in MOV format manually.
<p></p><a class='urllink' href='http://www.apple.com/trailers/'>http://www.apple.com/trailers/</a>
<p></p>If your using zoomplayer and you have latest quicktime installed you will be able to play these MOV trailers before your movie, I'm not sure if there are other players that can do this.
<p></p>Ok now that we have some vob and mov trailers we should first organize them. I find it best to keep them single
directory like this
<p></p>c:\trailers\demo\dd_aurora.vob<br>
c:\trailers\demo\dd_broadway.vob<br>
c:\trailers\demo\dd_canyon.vob<br>
c:\trailers\demo\dd_egypt.vob<br>
c:\trailers\theater\alexander_m480.mov<br>
c:\trailers\theater\i_robot-tlr3_m480.mov<br>
c:\trailers\theater\manchuriancandidate-t_m240.mov<br>
c:\trailers\theater\napoleon_dynamite_m240.mov
<p></p>the reasoning behind this format is you only have to add the single path "C:\trailers\" to the trailers import box, and based off the directory structure we can extract some information about the trailers. For our demo trailers they will be given the genre "demo" and for our theater trailers they will be given the genre "theater" this is extracted from the subdirectory the trailer is in.
<p></p>Ok now we can start setting up xlobby to play them before a movie. First thing you must do is import your trailers, this can be done in setup under in the "trailer paths" box on the first page. In my case I would simply add "C:\trailers" and click import. Now the trailers are safely stored in a database for use.
<p></p>The next and most important thing to do is setup the playlist to described how you want your movie to play. This is done by creating a new event for the file types section. You'll see in the filetypes section 3 events
<p></p>offline - what happens if this item is offline<br>
start - before the assigned program is executed do this<br>
end - after the assigned program quits do this
<p></p>Now the start event is what we are interested in, this is where we will setup the playlist BEFORE the program is launched. So now we goto the event manager and create a new event, to start off we will make it very simple by adding 3 commands.
<p></p>video playlist->new playlist<br>
video playlist->play trailer, "c:\trailers\demo\dd_aurora.vob"<br>
video playlist->play video
<p></p>This event will now create a new playlist to play specific trailer and then the play video. I said it was simple. Ok now something a little more complex, what if we wanted a specific trailer followed by a demo, followed by a theatrical trailer.
<p></p>video playlist->new playlist<br>
video playlist->play trailer, "c:\trailers\demo\dd_aurora.vob"<br>
video playlist->play random trailer from db, "trailers", "genre=demo"<br>
video playlist->play random trailer from db, "trailers", "genre=theater"<br>
video playlist->play video
<p></p>Thats it, now you see why we setup the directory structure that way, we need to extract that genre info from it. You could always add it manually though with the database editor by creating a "genre" field and typing in your genre.
<p></p>Another command that is available is the "video playlist->play random trailer from path", what this does is randomly selects a trailer from a path you specify. Note: YOU MUST specify the extentions for the trailer, avi,mov,mpg whatever.
<p></p><h2>Advanced trailer selection</h2>
<p></p>video playlist->play random trailer from db
<p></p>can do a little bit more when it comes to selecting the proper trailer for a movie. Instead of actually specify a genre like we did before in the case of "genre=demo" you can just use "genre" and it will use the movie's genre if it has one to pick a trailer. So if your playing a "drama" movie it will look for a "drama" trailer, this can also be used for "rating" and anything else you want to match that has a field in both the movie and the trailer.
<p></p>Now if you really want to start getting advanced you can speficy multiple genre trailers for one genre with "Trailer Filters" this is found in the "Misc" section of setup. Here you can specify stuff like, when movie is "scifi" play trailers that are "scifi, action, horror". Same idea for rating filters. One last thing about "video playlist->play random trailer from db" if you DO NOT specify a "Filter" it will select a random trailer from the entire database.
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