MovieGallery

Product Description & How To

If you ever used an Android device with movies, you might have ran into complications finding your movies. The build-in video player, Gallery, is a bit limited in regards of how it displays your movies and TV shows.

Android Gallery on Honeycomb 3.2 Tablet

The Android Gallery app generates a screenshot from somewhere at the beginning video, and while the look it provides is pretty cool, it doesn’t display any names, making it a bit tricky to find the one movie or episode you want to watch.

With Honeycomb 3.0, it was possible to use a trick to display images instead of videos:

Android Gallery Cover Image Trick (HC30)

But in recent updates, Google changes some things causing it to no longer work.

This is where MovieGallery comes in.

Because of the limitations in Android Gallery, we created our own video gallery app for Android, MovieGallery, that makes it easier to display what you want in order to skim through your movies.

MovieGallery 1.0

Originally created to just provide a simple way to browse and play your movies and tv shows using the cover images you want to use for them, we continue to add new features and options to it.

MovieGallery 1.2.5

How does MovieGallery work?

The basic idea behind MovieGallery is quite simple. When you start MovieGallery, it will scan your Android device (NOOK, Xoom, Droid etc) for MP4 video files. Because MovieGallery uses hardware acceleration for video playback, it will only look for video files supported by your device. If you have a large collection of movies in an unsupported format (DVD, AVI, MKV etc) you would like to use with MovieGallery, you will need to convert them to a compatible format with a program such as DVD Catalyst 4.

After MovieGallery scanned your device for movies, it will look for matching (jpg/png) images with the same name. It will use these images for your movie selection. If you do not have matching images on your device, MovieGallery will display a “generic” image.

and if no movies are found at all, it will display the following to at least give you an idea on what it looks like.

How to get cover images?

MovieGallery doesn’t include or obtain cover images for your movies (we are working on something though) so in order to make it look cool, you will have to find or create your own. For many movies, you can just visit sites like Amazon or IMDB, or websites such as albumart.org that have them. When you find an image you like, you simply rightclick on it, and select “save image”.

Amazon.com

IMDB.com

albumart.org

For a filename, make sure you name it the same as the movie file you want to use it with.

When you copy the movie to your device, also copy over the saved image of course:

MovieGallery Features:

MovieGallery is a bit more than just a simple Gallery replacement. While its original function is to provide a cool-looking selection method for your movies, it does offer much more:

The basics:

*displays images for your videos rather than generated thumbnails.

*integrated, hardware-accelerated video player functionality.

*HDMI compatible on Honeycomb Tablets (Xoom/Thrive etc) MovieGallery works 100% on TV.

The cool stuff:

*3D-ish flip-display to skim through your videos.

*Handy additional functionality for video playback.

MovieGallery’s “Gallery View” Feature List:

*3D-ish image display for your movie cover images.

*free/trial version is limited to display 10 movies.

*paid-only: choice between 3D and Flat modes for the Gallery display.

*paid-only: Adjustable image size:

*paid-only: turn mirror display on/off

*paid-only: selectable backgrounds

Choice of 4 types build-in

Or one of your own

*display movie title and location.

*paid-only: turn movie name, movie location and play-button display on/off:

*tap on the movie image to play the video.

MovieGallery’s “Video Player” Feature List:

*paid-only: selectable backgrounds

Selection of 4

Or your own

*Player controls:

*movie position slider

*paid-only: adjust time duration for how long controls remain visible.

*skip 1 and 5 minutes forward/backward buttons. Long-press for 2 and 10 minute jumps.

*Zoom-button to control video playback mode:

Fit video on screen

Original Size

Zoom (make your movies fullscreen)

*paid-only: adjust skip times from 1 second to 45 minutes for tap and long-press behavior.

*paid-only: Loop video playback. Continuously play the same video over and over.

*paid-only: Play all videos. After the selected video is finished, the next one will automatically start playing.

*Tap the screen to pause/resume.

*paid-only: turn-off touchscreen feature. Tapping the screen itself will not do anything. Menu button will be used instead.

*Multi-position remember. MovieGallery will remember where you left off with all the movies you watch with it. If you didn’t finish watching a movie, but watched something else afterwards, MovieGallery will still remember where you left off in your movie.

*Folder selection.

A bit tricky to add, but its in there and it works. By default, MovieGallery looks for commonly used SD Card locations for movies, but in order to speed things up a bit, or to prevent it from displaying all movies, you can point it to one or more folders to look in rather than all. Green folders are monitored, Red are inaccessible, Blue allows you to navigate. In order to add/remove a folder from being monitored, go into the folder, and tap the Add or Remove button. In order to use the changes, you have to restart MovieGallery after the changes.

Movie Gallery is available in the Android Market in 2 flavors:

Movie Gallery ($2) : https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tools4movies.moviegallery

Movie Gallery Free: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tools4movies.moviegallery.free