[RELEASE] Artist Slideshow 1.3.0 addon (with skin and addon integration)

With the release of Artist Slideshow 1.3.0 and the change of maintainers, Ronie and I decided it was a good time to start a new thread.

Artist Slideshow Features

• displays slideshow as background for music visualization (must use a compatible skin or update skin using the instructions below)
• option to have artist images downloaded and/or use a local directory of artist images
• option for a fallback slideshow if no local or remote images are found
• option to have a single slideshow displayed regardless of artist playing
• downloads artwork from htbackdrops.com and/or last.fm to display as background for music visualization
• option to download artist bio and other additional information (skin must support display of this information)
• option to download only images larger than a given length and width
• option to download only images with 16:9 aspect ratio
• option to limit size of download cache
• support for internet streams that put the artist name in the XBMC title field
• support for other addons using Artist Slideshow to provide the background
  

For a complete list of options as well as instructions for skin and addon integration, please see the Artist Slideshow Addon wiki page.

I have updated the Confluence MusicVisualization.xml and MusicOSD.xml to support Artist Slideshow. You can download the XBMC Eden (v11) or XBMC Frodo (v12) version.

Once you install these two files, Confluence will use Artist Slideshow to provide the background. If you bring up the music OSD you will get the artist biography.

New test version available. This merges changes from NisseDILLIGAF that should work with most radio streams now (i.e. with a format of Artist - Title in the XBMC title field).

https://github.com/pkscout/script.artistslideshow

Hello ...
I don't know if I missing something, but is there a way to save downloaded images in extrafanart folder of the artist ?

thanks ...

mardup Wrote:Hello ...
I don't know if I missing something, but is there a way to save downloaded images in extrafanart folder of the artist ?

Yes, with caveats. In the Slideshow section of the settings you can designate a local artist artwork folder and then in the Image Priority section select "Use both local and remote images." If you already have the artist/extrafanart folder setup, the downloaded images will be added to that directory.

And that brings caveat #1. The artist/extrafanart directory must already exist and there must be at least one image in the extrafanart directory. If both these things are not true, the images will be downloaded to the default cache directory. Caveat #2 is that the images are stored as .tbn files. That's fine for artist slideshow, but I'm not sure what will happen if you try and use those images in other parts of the skin. I think it will be fine, but I've never tried it.

(2012-03-11 01:35)pkscuot Wrote:  (...) The artist/extrafanart directory must already exist and there must be at least one image in the extrafanart directory. If both these things are not true, the images will be downloaded to the default cache directory. (...)

Thanks for your answer

It's a shame.

Many of my artists have no extrafanart (CDart MAnager plugin does not find any pictures) while this script (Artist Slideshow) displays many images for these artists.
I thought that progressively, I could fill my empty extrafanart folders.

Perhaps in a future release

(2012-03-12 17:50)mardup Wrote:  Many of my artists have no extrafanart (CDart MAnager plugin does not find any pictures) while this script (Artist Slideshow) displays many images for these artists.
I thought that progressively, I could fill my empty extrafanart folders.

You can do this manually. The cached files are stored in userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow/ArtistSlideshow. The directory names are hashed, but you can look at the images to see which artist is in what folder. Copy the tbn files to a new extrafanart directory and rename them as .jpg files.

It is unlikely that doing this automatically will be added. The names of the folders and files are hashed, I suspect, to avoid problems with odd characters in artist names and platform specific characters not allowed in names. I can use an existing directory because I know the name of the directory must be OK because it exists.

@mardup

If you find quality images feel free to add them at http://fanart.tv so others can download them to using cdart manager

Is there any way to limit the size of individual images? I ran WinDirStat the other day and noticed that I had several 30mb+ PNG files in the cache directory.

Thanks.

ok, thanks all for your answers !