I figured any effort to get back to regular posting would only be helped by starting on today of all days… XBMC have announced a new partnership with Sony.
It will include the assimilation of the XBMC team into Sony’s Home Theatre and Console division and the closing of the XBMC source. Presumably a PS3 port will be forthcoming.
I found a new website through the MythTV mailing list a few days called The Movie DB. It’s essentially aiming to be an open version of IMDB.
Many projects (such as MythTV and XBMC) have depended IMDB for a long time to provide metadata. Unfortunately this has usually been against the rules and was often difficult any since it relies on rather fragile screen scraping.
So in steps the Movie DB. From what I can tell from reading around the forums and stuff (and apologies if any of this isn’t accurate) it was started by the guy who wrote Meligrove, a database of fan made movie posters to replace a similar effort called Movie XML. The content is a little limited right now (about 8000 movies apparently) but the database from Movie XML is soon to be imported adding another 150,000.
Of course the important point is that the Movie DB is an open database - all the entries are editable wiki style. It also has high level support for TV series (with seasons and episodes etc) as well and a not-quite-ready public API.