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XBMC Commander - Yet another unofficial third-party XBMC remote for iPad - Printable Version

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- d3ll - 2011-04-01

Just wanted to jump on here and say thanks for the update! Rated 5 stars Smile

I had problems with it crashing to the springboard after updating but reinstalling seems to have fixed that.

Really liking the details fanart view!

Is there any chance of getting something similar to the Music bookshelf view for the photos section? The one that looks like photos pinned to a board, something like that would be great for photos Smile


- rolapinou - 2011-04-01

meridius Wrote:Hi i dont own an ipad yet but just noticed this is out on the iphone now

but there seems to be problems with it.

problem

1, when you watch a tv show or movie and stop it or finished watching it and then you select a different movie or tv show it just keeps playing the first program you selected when you first loaded up xbmc. even shutting down the remote app does not fix this you have to shut down xbmc to be able to select a different movie or tv show to play but then you get the same problem again.

2, Shortcuts that dont work at all are (Info, OSD, menu, subtitles) the other ones seem to work

3 i can not get tv shows to display as banners only posters

hope this
helps cheers

I've noticed the same problems and posted a few pages ago.
I'm "glad" to see i'm not the only one with shortcuts non working on the remote page of the app.
For the first problem, it has been indicated that it is going to be solved.


- meridius - 2011-04-01

how do you get the fanart option or banner option for tv shows ?
there is no option for fanart its the first time i installed it on my iphone

thanks

oh on the top left is there any chance of adding the star rating for movies and a movie and tv show count so you know how many you have on your server

cheers exellent app can not wait to try it on the ipad

for some reason the tv shows somtimes show as posters and other times as banners it just does what it want on that part ?


- Nacmacfeegle - 2011-04-01

Hi mate I just installed it on my iPad first, it looks like fan art is iPad only as i' just had a play on the phone version as well.


- meridius - 2011-04-01

ah right cheers

what about the banner ? i can not get it to work it keeps using posters for the tv show and it has only once loaded up as banners and even then the banners where not right as it was using the posters picture for the banners instead of the banners pictures

is there not an option for the tv shows to use posters or banners what ever you want to use ?

my folder contains poster named and folder.jpg and banner.jpg and i have the skin set to use banner.jpg for banners in alaska skin also have landscape.jpg and fanart.jpg in teh tv show folder


- grywnn - 2011-04-01

Good morning everyone (it's 9am here in germany Smile)!

First of all i have to say:
I'm totally blown away by your reactions!
A few months ago i'd never have thought my small spare time project would get this amount of feedback.
Thank you all, this is what motivates me to drive the development even further!

Now let my try to follow up a few points from the last pages:

Bugs and problems first:
  • Video playback enqueues the video and starts the first playlist item
  • Remote control doesn't work with atv
    I'm very happy to announce that i was able to get an urgency call for review at apple, and the bugfix release 2.0.1 got released a few hours ago.
    The "play" buttons now behave as expected (again), and i've added a "atv workaround" switch to the ipads system settings app, which will force the remote to work via http api instead of the event server.
    This has one small limitation though:
    Continuous scrolling via swipe & hold won't work. But the rest should.
  • Settings aren't remembered
  • Remote control shortcuts don't work
    Both rely heavily on so called .plist files, which are basically some xml files in which settings and defaults are stored.
    I haven't changed anything in the code concerning these two, so i think that these problems are update related.
    My guess is that the app was running while it was updated, and these files got mixed up somehow (like, the app is reading from the file for the new version, but writing to a temp. copy of the old one that's still in memory)
    If i'm right, the fix should be easy:
    Please try to terminate the app and restart it.
    That is, double click on the home button; mutlitasking bar will appear. Tap and hold the app icon; "-" will appear. Press the "-" to terminate the app; click the home button to close the multitasking bar.
    Best try this before you update to 2.0.1, and restart the app after updating
    (please someone leave a short note if this helps)
  • App not working on iPods
    I've received two mails indicating that the app starts with a black screen on iPods.
    Though i did some throughout testing on my two iphones, i don't own an ipod (and apparently none of my beta testers Smile). Theoretically the app should run just as well on an ipod as on an iphone, but as we say here in germany: Der Teufel ist ein Eichhörnchen.
    Here's what i'm going to do about it: I'm going to head to my favorite apple store, bug them a little about why my iPad 2 is taking so long to deliver, and buy an ipod for testing... Lets see if i can reproduce the issue. I'll keep you updated.

Feature related things:
  • wake on lan / zeroconf
    @bluey: Wake on lan is available, add your mac address in server setting and it should work. Haven't bothered with zeroconf yet, but i'll have a look at it.
    @adskee: Sounds like you've got something wrong with your system. If it comes back on even if xbmc commander is closed, there's probably something wrong with either your suspend config or the wol config on your xbmc system.
  • tv show poster / banner support
    This has been discussed a lot, and is commonly misunderstood.
    The poster.jpg and banner.jpg files are a workaround that skinners introduced to cover the fact that xbmc itself can only handle one kind of tv show thumbnail - the one you set your scraper up to download.
    Since xbmc commander - as a remote - has no direct access to the servers filesystem, i can only use the thumbnails xbmc offers me.
    The app downloads the first thumbnail, tries to determine wether it's poster or banner size, and switches to the corresponding view. For reasons unknown this autodetection sometimes gets it wrong, that is what the switch in the ipads system settings is for.
    Again: XBMC Commander can't influence what kind of tv show thumbnails it gets. That's set up in XBMC.
    If you want to move from banners to posters, you'll have to change your scrapers settings, and rescrape your library.

    Note: There are plans to change this behavior thus allowing xbmc to handle posters and banners side by side. So we'll see this in a future version of xbmc, at which point i'll add the free choice to the app as well.
  • scrollbars
    A very common request i'm getting is adding scrollbars to the lists.
    I'm going to add these. Problem is that due to design decisions i've made in very early stages of the app i can't use the ones provided by iOS, but have to code my own. This will be a bit of a challenge, but one i'm up to Smile
    Just give me a little time...
  • fanart on iphone
    Well, you've noticed it: I've chosen not to include the fanart views on the iphone. Screen is just too small Smile
  • bookshelf for photos
    I like this idea a lot: A wooden wall with pictures pinned to it; or a photo album style.
    But i'm holding back the whole pictures thing until xbmc supports server side image scaling, which is on the roadmap.



- marv_el - 2011-04-01

finally, a really good app for my iphone to control xbmc. tried them all, but that's certainly the best.

i am not sure if this was asked before, but will you support for example last.fm (search for artists...) or other (music) addons?

that would be great.

thanks for this app!


- Nacmacfeegle - 2011-04-01

"Theoretically the app should run just as well on an ipod as on an iphone, but as we say here in germany: Der Teufel ist ein Eichhörnchen.
Here's what i'm going to do about it: I'm going to head to my favorite apple store, bug them a little about why my iPad 2 is taking so long to deliver, and buy an ipod for testing... Lets see if i can reproduce the issue. I'll keep you updated."

I have an Ipod touch, Phone, and a pad I'll give it a quick go on the Pod for you later tonight, I'll probably only test movies as I don't use XBMC for music, and don't have my (very few) TV series scraped properly yet.

Thanks for your hard work, good luck in fixing these bugs.
Tchuss .


- grywnn - 2011-04-01

Bought an ipod, took me about 2 minutes to figure out the problem...
Silly stupid little mistake - the ipod doesn't know which window to start with.
You can specify either a default window or a specific one for ipad and one for iphone. I did the later. Who would have guessed that the ipod, having the same ui as the iphone, doesn't use the window defined for iphone but looks for the default...?

Well, i've fixed this, but i don't think i can use apples express lane for urgent updates again.
So this update will have to go the usual way and will be available in ~one week.

btw:
There's still a iphone / ipad only (aka lite) version of the app in apples revision pipeline. That one will work on the ipod.

As for addon support:
xbmc currently offers no external interface to addons, so theres no way for me to comunicate with them.


- BigCheese - 2011-04-01

Hi - love your xbmc commander, but one question: when I am not connected to xbmc: why do i have empty lists in tv episodes or empty descriptions when i click on a film detail - can you change this so every thing is in offline mode accessible?

cheers,
Bigcheese


- grywnn - 2011-04-01

Quote:Hi - love your xbmc commander, but one question: when I am not connected to xbmc: why do i have empty lists in tv episodes or empty descriptions when i click on a film detail - can you change this so every thing is in offline mode accessible?

Thats because only data that has been accessed at least once is cached, and then available in offline mode.
But i've added a way to pre-cache everything: Look at the options menu under "cache".
Once you hit the "download all data" button you'll understand why i don't do this by default...


- meridius - 2011-04-01

Hi there grywnn exellent app and i mean that not many apps impress me but this app is tremendous.

a couple of questions.

Q1 I know you said you have to scrap banners for the tv shows so that you cna view them as banners in the xbmc commander. But where do you do this is it in the videos or movies as when i go to videos there still all in posters and i have checked the scraper option and its not selected as posters ? or is it just getting the folders.jpg from my folder as default which are posters.

Do i need to go into videos select a tv show and change the picture to a banner.jpg so that xbmc commander loads it up as banners ? and what happens if there mixed as banners and poster sizes.

i have my tv shows as posters at teh min as all my tv shows lib all have there tv shows pictures set to folder.jpg whihc is the same size as posters.

i quick help on how to get the banners to work would be great.

Q2 can you add some sort of how many movies and tv show numbers to the top left of the remote.

Q3 are the shortucts on the same screenas thegestures on the ipad ? as i know your limited to screen size on the iphone.

Q4 how much space does the cache take up on the iphones memory ? i was just woundering as i wanted to know if it reduce the iphone space by alot

Q5 also it would be great if you could add options to disable some shortcuts like libaray update as my wife has already touched this twice and buggerd some shows up. might be better to add that in the options menu maybe ?


cheers for the great app can not wait to try it out on my ipad when i get it as this is why i wanted this app great on the iphone but i bet it looks great on the ipad.


- SofaKng - 2011-04-01

This application is GREAT!

...but I have one tiny suggestion/question:

Is it possible to list the TV shows in banner-mode but have two columns? (like XBMC typically displays them)

It would look MUCH better.


- grywnn - 2011-04-01

Q1 Please do me a favor and do a little search in this thread or the xbmc documentation.
~50% of the support i'm doing is about banners / posters, and i must admit i'm getting a little tired of explaining it over and over again...

Q2 I'll have a look where i can fit this in.

Q3 Yep

Q4 Thumbnails take about 20-30k, so 400 thumbs take aprox. 10MB. Double this for retina. Fanart is stored in the iPhones temp dir and purged on a regular basis by the system.

Q5 menu is editable on the ipad, i just didn't have time to port this feature to the iphone.

@SofaKng
I hate the 2-column views Smile
It's actually not that easy to change from 1 to 2 columns, because i'm handling banners completely different from posters.
But maybe i'll give it a try in a future layout.


- SofaKng - 2011-04-01

Thanks for the response even though I LIKE 2-columns! Smile

Anyways - keep up the great work. XBMC Commander is an amazing application.