Cool Movie Browser

Cool Movie Browser - faster, better, cooler

2010-10-12T22:51:00.036+02:00

Cool Movie Browser discovers and gathers all your video files, which are distributed on different computers and hard-drives, into a single place. After that, you can play them in your favorite (you choose) media player application (VLC Player, Windows Media Player, QuickTime Player etc)

Features:

Online Sport TV panel that gives you all the sport live streams (hockey, soccer, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, cricket etc) from net with the games of the day, all across the world.

Online Live TV with the "non-sport" live TV streams (TV news, movies channels, NASA TV, etc) from net.

YouTube TV screen allows you to search and watch youtube videos.

Dailymotion TV screen gives you access to the dailymotion video portal..

As said before, Cool Movie Browser allows you to play each movie with its own media player (i.e. you can set .avi files to be played with VLC Player, and all .mpg movies with Windows Media Player). The beauty power of this is that it leverages the different / preferred media players on your computer, and you can play all kind of media files from one single interface.

For each discovered movie Cool Movie Browser will bring the poster image from the "cloud" (Internet), so you don't have to worry about identifying quickly your preferred show. Also, you can create and manage (create, edit, delete, reorder, play) your own playlists, or group the movies on categories (action, drama, comedy, kids, etc).

Buzz: This application can centralize different kind of files, not only movies. Because it's flexible and configurable, we can choose the extension of the file, which we need to see (.doc), and instead of setting the command line for WMPlayer, we can put the one for Office Word. Doing this you can easily manage all Word documents from your different hard-drives, in one single place.

Indeed it's really cool!

Cool Movie Browser (CMB) respects the rights of copyright holders and publishers and requires all users to confirm they own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder of content. SMB doesn't store, share any files; it's just a browser like Internet Explorer, which accesses the web.

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Cool Movie Browser - Playlists - part 3

2010-10-12T22:49:00.000+02:00

The playlist are very important dynamic feature of the application because they allow the user to group a set of movies (i.e. Terminator 1, 2, 3, 4), which easily can be found and played.

Right-click action on each list (playlist or/and movie) will display the menu with the available actions (play, or move up or down).

So for making the playlists more available we created the second tab (screen) which allows two modes of operating:
- editor, as we have already explained in the Playlists - part 2 (playlist dialog), and
- player, we can play one whole playlist, or individual movie from the playlist. In case of big list of playlist, we have the possibility to minimize/restore the list of movies, by using the 2 arrow buttons from the below toolbar.

Editor mode:
To enter in edit mode we have to double-click on a row. We can edit the name of the playlist, the list of movies, and their sequence too. To edit a movie we can either type the full name including the path, or use the "browse" button (little button with 3 dots at the right-end of the grid edit field).

To delete a row we just remove the content of the row and then we click the ENTER key.

To change the sequence of the movies from a playlist we are using the right-click menu, like in the next image.

Note: Any change that we make into any of these 2 lists must be followed by a click on the SAVE button, from the bottom-right toolbar.

Player mode:
This mode is just for quick identification of the movies that you want to watch. You can play all movies by playing a playlist, or one movie at the time.

Watching a movie or playlist can be done either by selecting the "play" option from the right-click menu, or by clicking on the "play" button from the bottom-left toolbar.

The play playlist button has the double-play arrow icon (first from the toolbar).

The play movie button has the standard play icon (second from the toolbar).

The other 2 arrow buttons are used for hiding/showing the list of movies.

And also, the "save" button is for saving the modifications.

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Cool Movie Browser - User's guide

2010-09-26T23:14:00.000+02:00

At startup the application is browsing the configured folders for movies (in case you added or deleted some) in order to display an actualized list.

There are 3 areas that compose the application:
- top toolbar
- movie list
- bottom toolbar.

1. Top Toolbar

The top toolbar contains the main action buttons and the search control.

The action buttons are:
- Refresh, for launching the movie discovery task
- Search, to search for the movies that contain the typed text in their names.
- All, after a search action to display the all movies list
- Settings, to launch the settings dialog.
- Info, to display the version of the application
- Home, to go to the home web page for more information.

2. Movie List

Displays the movies in 2 modes:

- detailed mode: image + movie name + folder location in a list layout.

- matrix mode: image in a matrix layout to quickly identify your movie in case of big list.

On this list we can execute some actions, allowed by the popup menu, which is displayed by right-clicking on a movie.

So, we can perform the following actions:
- play the selected movie
- rename the selected movie
- change the image for the movie, by choosing another one from your computer
- delete image, so we can then "Refresh" and try to discover another one (usually this an action that follows the rename movie one).
- delete movie from your hard-drive (careful with it, 'cause we cannot undo it).

3. Bottom Toolbar

The bottom toolbar was explained in the section related with the "Playlists - part 1"

4. Sport Live TV screen

This screen contains a simple list of links for the live games, and at the bottom we have provided a web player, where the web page is loaded and the stream player is displayed.

There is simple toolbar with 3 buttons (4 for trial):
- 1. stop the selected game
- 2. display the "Other" sports page
- 3. show home page Cool Movie Browser.
- 4. button "buy now" available for trial version, is opening the store page of the application.

The list of shows is for the current day, and usually is quite dynamic, so if you use the tool for long time, then from time to time is recommended to refresh the list by clicking on the "Refresh" button.

5. Online Live TV

This screen contains, like the one from the point 4, a simple list of links for the "online TV"s, and at the bottom there is a web browser, which will be used to load the live stream, from Internet, for the selected show.

The toolbar and the usage are exactly the same like explained previously at the point 4.

Note: In trial version the web page is periodically reseted to the home page at every 2 minutes.

See more:

Cool Movie Player - Playlists - part 2

2010-09-26T22:54:00.000+02:00

The fast creation of playlist and watching them was explained in the previous post.

Editing the Playlists

After we click on the "playlist button" from the bottom toolbar we have opened the below dialog:

We have displayed the list of all playlist names in the top list, and selecting one name, the bottom list with file is populated with the movie files that belong to the selected playlist.

We can add playlist by typing the name of a new playlist on the last row [type here to add], and the we have to add files to it. This is done in the second list called "Movies", and editing is done like in the previous configuration dialogs (type name to edit, type in the last row to ad new one, empty the row to be removed).

Changing the order of movies can be done by right-clicking on the movie and selecting the option from the popup menu (one row up and down, go to first or last row), shown in the above image.

After we finished editing we click on the "OK" button to record changes.

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Cool Movie Player - Playlists

2010-09-26T22:50:00.000+02:00

After we finished the configuration and the application started to discover the movies and their images, we are good to go and use it for what was supposed to do "watch your movies".

You can see the list of all movies in detailed mode (image + name of movie + location where is was loaded from), or in the matrix mode (just images - no text), by clicking on the bottom check-box called "Hide name".

Here on the bottom toolbar we have few controls:
- text indicator of status (# of movies, pending tasks)
- double play icon button is to play and/or configure the playlists.
- play icon button is to play the selected movies (1 or more)
- hide names check-box allows to switch between "detailed mode" and "matrix mode"
- hint indicator that to play a movie is enough just to double-click on it
- error icon button displays the errors log, in case that they appear in the system (and which can be very helpful for debugging).

1. Creation of the playlist

This can be done in 2 ways:

- fast way, by selecting a group of movies, then right click on them and select the option "Create playlist", followed by setting the name, and then it's save and ready to use.

- detailed way, by clicking on "double-play icon button" (playlist button) from the bottom toolbar, which opens a playlist editor, where we can rename, delete, add, change the order of the movies.

The explanation about using the playlist editor are here.

2. Watching the playlist

This can be done by selecting the playlist from the menu that opens when we hover with the mouse on top of the "playlist button" - without clicking on it.

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Cool Movie Browser - Settings - part 2

2010-09-26T21:56:00.000+02:00

The previous configuration instructions were about movie file extensions, and movie folders.

This section is about setting up the Media Players, and it's more "darker side", because implies getting and setting some technical information related to the command line for each player. Because we understand this point, we provided the command lines for 2 default players. This is explained at point 1).

1. Default Media Player

We need to set a default media player in case that not all the movie file extensions are associated with an specific player.

The editor for the default player is a text field editor, where we provide the command line with all arguments, which is used by the application to launch the media player.

Because this information is too technical, we provided the command lines for the most used media players:

WMP = Windows Media Player
VLC = VLC Player

And you can select one player or another to be default just by clicking on the radio buttons from the right side.

Note: there is an orange "hint" indicator that explains briefly the rules for the command line (including the environment variable %ProgramFiles%) .

To get the command line for other player you have just to either:
- search on google "player-name command line"
- check where is installed your player (i.e. QuickTime Player - C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QuickTimePlayer.exe) and copy the while path to the exe file, to the command line editor.

2. Individual Media Players

If we prefer or we are forced to launch different player for some movie extensions then the below table is used to set this information.

Manipulating the list of individual players from this grid is done in a similar way like editing the folders.

2.1. Adding a new player command line we click and start typing in the last row [extension] [command line] the extension of the movie file (in the same format like movie extensions setting) and the in the second column we type the command line.

In the above image we have a sample for setting up the QuickTime Player:

.m4v | C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QuickTimePlayer.exe

2.2. Editing is simple, click with mouse and start typing in the editing field.

2.3 Deleting is done in the same fashion like for folders, we have to empty both columns (extension, and command line), and then the empty row will be removed.

And after finishing these settings we can click on the "OK" button, to save them and to launch discovering the movies and their posters.

See more:

Cool Movie Browser - Settings - part 1

2010-09-26T21:10:00.000+02:00

There are few things that Cool Movie Browser needs to be properly set up:

list of movie file extensions
folders where you keep the movie files
media players used for watching the movies.

To start the configuration dialog we have to click on the button "Config" and we'll get the Settings dialog.

1. Movie File Extensions

To be able to discover your movies, the application needs these extensions. They are in the format ".avi" (dot followed by the extension). In case of multiple extensions we have to separate them by "space character" (blank).

Also, at the right-end of the extensions text field there is an icon with "hint", which briefly explain the rule of extensions.

Note: Application has already set some default extensions: .avi .wmv .mpg .mp4 .divx .nrg

2. Media Folders

The folders editor is a table, which allow us to edit, remove and add new folders to the list.

2.1 Editing an existing folder is enabled by clicking on the row, and either typing the name of the folder, or using the "browse" button (little button with ...) from the end of edit line.

2.2. Deleting of and existing folder is done by editing the folder to empty string (remove th whole name) and the click ENTER (automatically empty row is removed).

2.3. Adding a new folder can be done by clicking of the last row with the test [folder path] and then like at the point 2.1 we can edit the new folder followed by pressing the ENTER key.

Note: In case that the folders are on the same machine, on different hard-drives the above explications are OK !

2.4. For remote folders from another computers, then we have to prepare remote access to then, by using the Window "folder sharing/mapping" features.

2.4.1. To share a folder in windows, we go on the remote computer and just right-click on it, select the option "Sharing and Security", check the "share" check-box, select eventually the rights for access (but by default it's read-only share). More you can read from Microsoft support page.

2.4.2 To map a remote shared folder to your computer, you go on the computer where you installed Cool Movie Browser, and the go to the network places (or in the Windows Explorer type \\your-remote-computer-name in the address bar), select the computer and shared folder, and then right click-on it and select option "Map network Drive...", select a letter for your mapped drive, check on the "Reconnect at logon" and then you done by clicking OK button. More you can read from Microsoft support page.

>>> The next page is about setting up the Media Players.

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Installation of Cool Movie Browser

2010-09-26T21:03:00.000+02:00

After you bought the applications (thanks), you downloaded the installer CoolMovieBrowser-1.7.110202-setup.exe file.

You double-click on this file and then a classic installation wizard dialog will lead you to simple steps (pressing next-next-next) of the installation process.

This application requires the Java Runtime Env. (JRE >= 1.6.0_16) - and if you don't have it - don't worry, the installer will propose to download it, directly from the Oracle website.

After that you'll have a link on your desktop, which allows you easily to start the application.

Next step is setting up the configuration of the application.

Note: In case you install the full version, it's recommended to uninstall the trial version first.

Cheers!

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