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Child friendly Media Management


dannyboy

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Correct in part though a bit of an 'easy' answer - C4 does NOT do parental control internally - of course, your PLAYER might, which technically is where this should be taken care of anyway.

 

However these are two different thing - parental control is one thing (and might be what you're specifically looking for) - making movies completely unavailable/invisible is another.

You may simply not want certain movies available including their cover-art at all, or you'd want to limit guests to movies (though not to parental guidance settings) or you're trying to hide BluRay iso if your players don't support it, but your dedicated Theatre player does.......

 

On the one hand, parental guidance within C4 would be nice (and I imagine it would be possible to have it refuse to select movies above the threshold without a code) - on the other hand, I all too often don't agree with the rating given, so I'd be constantly editing the settings to make this work.

 

I wonder if you couldn't somehow rig two instances of mymovies onto a single computer though, have them run simultaneously and point each to a different sub-set that way.

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In addition, it IS a limitation within MyMovies at any rate - because if it allowed multiple dBs you could also use this quite outside of Control4 - for example give certain players no access to certain shares AT ALL - so that if you have a dedicated player in your kid's room, they wouldn't even be able to see those movies to begin with (think outside of Control4 completely and using built-in browsing capability).

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I think the limitation is that they are using a specific named SQL instance (MYMOVIES ?)--and it sounds like that won't change.  Maybe there is a trick to workaround that, but I have no idea.

 

I wonder if you couldn't somehow rig two instances of mymovies onto a single computer though, have them run simultaneously and point each to a different sub-set that way.

 

Right, in my case there are two players, one matrixed and one in the shared theater, but I see what you are saying.  I do understand there might be other options in the player, in the My Movies iOS app, or through the My Movies Dune/Mede8er Jukebox interface.  But I don't want to give up the C4 interface.  Also with the categorization built into My Movies, it really doesn't have anything to do with pre-defined ratings, etc. it would all be up to you if the My Movies APIs were utilized.

 

In addition, it IS a limitation within MyMovies at any rate - because if it allowed multiple dBs you could also use this quite outside of Control4 - for example give certain players no access to certain shares AT ALL - so that if you have a dedicated player in your kid's room, they wouldn't even be able to see those movies to begin with (think outside of Control4 completely and using built-in browsing capability).

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The problem even using that API would be that C4 is the middle-man here, it merely imports info, then uses that info to point a player to the file location.

 

The MyMovies management driver then cannot DO anything with that info, because it doesn't DO anything - it just passes on information.

 

There may be something to be done in the player drivers, but even then - those would have to then somehow be able to read additional encryption in the path that I suppose the management driver could introduce (it does so to a degree as it stands - hence the limitation on the driver you can use). But I don't see how that would be TOO helpful, as that path is made on creation, so unless that info is in the MyMovies db BEFORE the movie is 'scanned' into C4, it won't help.

 

So that brings us back to if this is to happen - it would have to be in the movie management/proxy from C4. Not using MyMovies' info (unless they decide to somehow incorporate MyMovies FULLY as the C4 database scanner) - because that would make it too narrow. There's other options out there too (Fusion has their own version with C4 import for example, so does Alan's Kodi driver etc), plus, While MyMovies is arguably among if not the best/biggest - in their time AMC and then Gracenote were too. I suspect C4 is a bit hesitant to restrict itself that way again.

 

Plus - that still doesn't take away some of the limitations that MyMovies' limit of one db brings quite outside of C4 as I mentioned them.

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