Thanks for the explanation of how the scripts/plugins are actually used - helps a lot when thinking about where to fill what data.
I will try to add a few "extension points" to the script so people can easily change the script behaviour (especially which data is put in where).
Now on to the other questions i found in your post:
I'm not sure there's any disadvantages to a script vs. a plugin.
You can make broader use of the programming language in a plugin.
e.g. the TMDb plugin probably uses some kind of xml parser.
If i were to write a plugin for TMDb i would actually add a JSON parsing unit (e.g.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/is-webstart/) and switch to the 3.0 API of TMDb.
This should improve performance and most likely there are some nice new features in the 3.0 API.
Does the API offer a way to select the default poster, or one classified by the same language as the user language?
Unfortunately all you get is a list of images grouped into posters and backdrops. Each image is available in 6 sizes and just has an id, width and height.
It is possible to search by language but most often there are more than 20 posters just in english (the plugin actually only downloads the english ones i think).
Another issue i had is preventing PVD from downloading the webpage URL which i don't care about because i only use the API.
The URL doesn't hurt, and can be used to get to the website, should the need arise. For me, that's usually to see what other posters are available.
No thats ok but the problem is that after returning the search results and the right movie is selected (automatically or by the user), PVD starts downloading (!) the URL i added to the selected result which of course is the webpage and not the api page of the movie (damn i suck at explaining stuff in english ^^).
I then receive the html content of this page in the ParsePage function which i have no use for - in this case i just make a redirection to the movies api page.
No big issue just a bit of overhead