Hey guys,
does anybody know, if there is an AMC catalog viewer app for apple devices around?
If not, I could build a little viewer based on the xml-export file, if some of you were interested.
Regards,
Moes
AMC Reader for iOS devices
(as I have such requests from time to time).
Hi,
I thought a little bit about it and there are some pre-conditions to make this work.
1. catalog must be stored as xml file (because the .amc file seems to be a binary)
2. images must be saved in a separate folder and reference to the images must be a relative path
3. the catalog.xml and image folder must be on a network share (so there would be no need for any sync, because you work with the actual catalog)
If these conditions are acceptable, it should be relatively to build an app that could read and write to the catalog.
Tell what you think!
Edit: OR, maybe (must invest in this one) the xml and images are stored in a dropbox folder that can be accessed by the iPad/iPhone.
I thought a little bit about it and there are some pre-conditions to make this work.
1. catalog must be stored as xml file (because the .amc file seems to be a binary)
2. images must be saved in a separate folder and reference to the images must be a relative path
3. the catalog.xml and image folder must be on a network share (so there would be no need for any sync, because you work with the actual catalog)
If these conditions are acceptable, it should be relatively to build an app that could read and write to the catalog.
Tell what you think!
Edit: OR, maybe (must invest in this one) the xml and images are stored in a dropbox folder that can be accessed by the iPad/iPhone.
Hi,Moes wrote:1. catalog must be stored as xml file (because the .amc file seems to be a binary)
2. images must be saved in a separate folder and reference to the images must be a relative path
3. the catalog.xml and image folder must be on a network share (so there would be no need for any sync, because you work with the actual catalog)
there is much more to it. Off the top my head - you have to work around the fact that XML is not in UTF-8. You have to consider that it can contain characters based on user's computer locale and you have to display them correctly. Also I've seen XML files as big as 30-35 MB and there is no way you can fit that into phone's memory (for example Android 2 has limit 26 MB for an app). Even if you could, it would take couple of minutes to load file that big. And not to forget invalid charactes in XML, which prevent loading. Good luck with that
Anyway, what I did with Android reader is that I ask user for locale, then I convert file to UTF-8 and load it into SQLite DB. I did tests with 5000 movies / 25 MB file and it took about 3 minutes on 1,5 GHz phone. Viewing from DB is then lightning fast.
Invalid characters could be fixed during conversion to UTF-8, but it would slow down import even more so I don't do that. There's a script called RemoveBadChars that can do just that for you on a PC.
Elman
It wouldn't be so hard to read the binary file of AMC. That could be done in most of the programming languages I think.
As long as you do not load all the pictures that are in it when reading the file contents (i.e. skipping pictures and just remembering at which position in the file is the pic of each movie to load it when needed), it should not take too much memory and might be faster than using an XML catalog.
As long as you do not load all the pictures that are in it when reading the file contents (i.e. skipping pictures and just remembering at which position in the file is the pic of each movie to load it when needed), it should not take too much memory and might be faster than using an XML catalog.