Movies General

Movie related FXD files contain a <movie>...</movie> tree directly under the top level <freevo> tag. The movie tag can include information about a cover image, a video source, variants (for instance, different language audio tracks), and other information.

Here is an example FXD:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<freevo>
  <movie title="My Movie Title">
    <cover-img source="http://url/to/cover/provider">MyMovie.jpg</cover-img>
    <video>
      <file id="f1">MyMovie.avi</file>
    </video>
    <info>
      <genre>Genre</genre>
      <runtime>123 minutes</runtime>
      <rating>8/10</rating>
      <tagline>The best movie ever!</tagline>
      <plot>Some long description</plot>
    </info>
  </movie>
</freevo>

Cover Image

The cover-img tag defines the image to use for this movie--typically a movie poster or DVD box art. A simple example:

<freevo>
   <movie title="My Movie">
      <cover-img source="movieposter.jpg"/>
      [...]
   </movie>
</freevo>

Video

The video tag defines all of the parts that make up a movie. For instance, a movie that spans multiple VCDs or that has been broken up into multiple AVI files. Each video definition needs to have a unique id (which may be referred to in the variants section below).

Valid child tags for <video> are <dvd>, <vcd>, and <file>. See the DTD for additional details.

A simple example:

<freevo>
   <movie title="My Video">
      <video>
         <file id="part1" name="My Video, Part 1">file1.avi</file>
         <file id="part2" name="My Video, Part 2">file2.avi</file>
      </video>
      [...]
   </movie>
</freevo>

The mplayer-options parameter can be used to give mplayer extra settings on a per-file basis, here is an example of this that crops the black borders from a video:

<freevo>
  <movie title="Batman: Dead End">
    <video>
      <file id="f1" mplayer-options="-vf crop=704:272:8:102">Batman_Dead_End.mpg</file>
    </video>
  </movie>
</freevo>

Variants

Sometimes movies contain several soundtracks or subtitles. On DVDs this will work automagically, but for plain files it is sometimes easier to specify it explicitly. You can use the <variants>-tags in this case. A simple example will look like this:

<freevo>
   <movie>
      [...]
      <video>
         <file id="p1">file1.avi</file>
      </video>
      [...]
      <variants>
         <variant name="Soundtrack German">
            <part ref="p1">
               <audio>audiofile.mp3</audio>
            </part>
         </variant>
      </variants>
      [...]
   </movie>
</freevo>

This will link in an extra external audio-file to be played back. The ref-Parameter in part references the corresponding file in <video>. You can then use "Show Variants" in the play-menu to select this track. However in most cases extra soundtracks are encoded into the same file. You can then try to use following structure:

<freevo>
   <movie>
      [...]
      <variants>
         <variant name="Soundtrack German" mplayer-options="-aid 0">
            <part ref="p1"></part>
         </variant>
      </variants>
      [...]
   </movie>
</freevo>

Notice the mplayer-options parameter. With -aid <number> a soundtrack is specified. There a different tags for audio and subtitles. For a complete reference, see the DTD file in Docs/freevo_XML_data.dtd.

Info

The info tag contains various tags with movie metadata. This includes an URL, genre, year, runtime, tagline, plot, and rating. See the DTD for more info.

Tools

If you have a collection of movie files, think about using freevo/util/fxdimdb.py to help you generate a complete FXD file by querying imdb.com and impawards.com. File's header points to html doc.