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

(2012-04-15 18:13)gates Wrote:  When I define local artist folder with my SMB sharing, it doesnt work.
I mean it doesnt get/found any extrafanart, and use the internet.

I'll need to do some checking. My initial guess is that the local artist artwork will have to be on a local drive. I know when I try and do a slideshow of images on the main home screen that it only works if the images are local, and Artist Slideshow uses the same core XBMC feature to play a slideshow from a folder of images. If you can assign a local drive letter (assuming your using Windows) to the SMB share, you *might* be able to do it that way.

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(2012-04-15 08:40)themarty Wrote:  It seems not all visualisations are compatible with Artist Slideshow and i was using one that wasn't. I assumed the artist slideshow would take over from the visualisation, but it appears that it the images are only shown in the transparent parts of the visualisation - this was not clear to me. As soon as i switched off the visualisation i saw the images. I also found two others in which i see the images in the transparent parts.
Maybe the wiki page should also mention this? But maybe i'm just a moron for not thinking of this before :-)

I added a limitations section to the wiki page and noted this (along with the potential issue with local images on an SMB share). Thanks for passing that along.

(2012-04-15 21:51)pkscuot Wrote:  I'll need to do some checking. My initial guess is that the local artist artwork will have to be on a local drive. I know when I try and do a slideshow of images on the main home screen that it only works if the images are local, and Artist Slideshow uses the same core XBMC feature to play a slideshow from a folder of images. If you can assign a local drive letter (assuming your using Windows) to the SMB share, you *might* be able to do it that way.

I'm on ubuntu. I try with a smb mount (for example //192.168.x.x/music/ => /home/xbmcUser/mnt_local_artist/), and it works !
very simple, even for a linux newbie like me

I tought about an option ...
would be possible to use only local fanart if we have more than 5 .jpg in extrafanart folder, and use both, local and internet, if we have less 5 .jpg ? (5 is for example of course)

hope my sentence is understandable

Maybe i'm not doing it correctly (i'm fairly new to xbmc), but i run into the following problem:

When i set a visualisation (that has transparent parts) all goes well: i see the images in the background and the visualisation in the foreground when i go to fullscreen. However: i find it annoying that the visualisation it sort of blocking the images.
When i select 'None' for visualisation i have the problem that the screensaver kicks in during the artist slideshow, even though i have selected the option that instead of the screensaver it should use the visualisation during audio-playback (but i guess that's because there is no visualisation).
The only option i have then is to disable the screensaver, but this gives two new problems:
1. this disables the screensaver also for all non-audio functionality
2. with this configuration it has happened twice that the slideshow images get stuck on one artist. When i look in the logs it says the script is already running when i start a new song (which is probably why the images for the new artist are not shown). I haven't been able to create an exact set of steps to reproduce this though. So, i can't even be sure it is really related to this configuration (no visualisation, no screensaver)

So, i guess if i don't want the visualisation to mess up the slideshow, while leaving the screensaver intact, i should create an empty visualisation? Or is there another way to do this?

(2012-04-16 11:21)gates Wrote:  I thought about an option ...
would be possible to use only local fanart if we have more than 5 .jpg in extrafanart folder, and use both, local and internet, if we have less 5 .jpg ? (5 is for example of course)

I understand what you're asking for. I'll have to ponder that. It's certainly technically possible, it just feels a little redundant to me. If you select both local and internet images, your local folder is used to cache everything, so after not very long, every local folder would have more than five images anyway. My guess is you're trying to stop duplicate images from downloading when you have lots of existing fanart. I get it, and I'd be interested in some feedback from other folks on whether this would be useful or not. Then I need to figure out how to explain the new setting in a very few characters.

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(2012-04-16 11:29)themarty Wrote:  2. with this configuration it has happened twice that the slideshow images get stuck on one artist. When i look in the logs it says the script is already running when i start a new song (which is probably why the images for the new artist are not shown). I haven't been able to create an exact set of steps to reproduce this though. So, i can't even be sure it is really related to this configuration (no visualisation, no screensaver)

When you get some time, put XBMC in debug mode and post a log when that happens. It shouldn't be getting stuck on an artist, and if it is I'd like to track that down.

Quote:So, i guess if i don't want the visualisation to mess up the slideshow, while leaving the screensaver intact, i should create an empty visualisation? Or is there another way to do this?

I've never used the screensaver, but it does look like what you've suggested is the only option if you want to keep the screensaver from kicking in while listening to music. Someone else might know for sure.

(2012-04-16 20:21)pkscuot Wrote:  I understand what you're asking for. I'll have to ponder that. It's certainly technically possible, it just feels a little redundant to me. If you select both local and internet images, your local folder is used to cache everything, so after not very long, every local folder would have more than five images anyway. My guess is you're trying to stop duplicate images from downloading when you have lots of existing fanart. I get it, and I'd be interested in some feedback from other folks on whether this would be useful or not. Then I need to figure out how to explain the new setting in a very few characters.

I will clarify my thinking, and try to show you how useful it could be

The goal is to have quality fanart in the music visualtion in first, and when it's not possible, still have something ont the screen.

My fanart are from fanart.tv (via auto DL in cdart manager addon). So they are all in 1920*1080, good quality etc etc.
Unfortunatly, some Artist have only 1 fanart, and music visualisation with only 1 fanart is a little boring (same with 2 fanart :x)

Of course, I can specify quality of internet downloaded jpg via "Minimal image width and height:" option (and select 1920*1080).
This way, i use both local and internet, and all will be OK.

But, there is a but ...
Some Artist haven't good quality fanart on last.fm or htbackdrops.com
In this case i'll get nothing for this artist in music visualisation.

Finally, I've to keep internet "low resolution", but dont really want to see them in the middle of my HD quality fanart visualisation.

By the way, i dont remember if I already say that : very great job on this addons (on my top 5 ).
thx for this.

(2012-04-16 20:21)pkscuot Wrote:  

(2012-04-16 11:29)themarty Wrote:  2. with this configuration it has happened twice that the slideshow images get stuck on one artist. When i look in the logs it says the script is already running when i start a new song (which is probably why the images for the new artist are not shown). I haven't been able to create an exact set of steps to reproduce this though. So, i can't even be sure it is really related to this configuration (no visualisation, no screensaver)

When you get some time, put XBMC in debug mode and post a log when that happens. It shouldn't be getting stuck on an artist, and if it is I'd like to track that down.

I've been analyzing the logs and what happens is the same as what happens when a song ends and a new song by the same artist is the next song.

This is what you see in the logs when the first song is about to be played:


And this is what you see when a song by the same artist is played after that:


And in those cases where it got stuck on the same artist i see the exact same thing happening in the logs (don't have an actual log of it at the moment, but will post it when i do).

I'm an epic noob when it comes to xbmc so please bare with me if I'm missing something basic.

Firstly, thank you for an awesome add-on this is exactly what I was looking for. The issue I'm having is the slide show seems to be scaling every image up to full screen width. This means in many images the top and bottom of the pictures are off screen and I get quite a few headless artist. Now considering some of the artists I listen to are pretty ugly this might be seen as a bonus but I would like to see the heads of the prettier ones

When I use the slideshow in photographs the images are scaled to fit the screen height and I get the black bars down the sides for the non 16:9 ratio images. This is exactly what I want the Artist Slideshow to do.

I hope this makes sense. I'm using Eden with the neon skin.

Edit: My mistake, I was using the Aeon Nox skin. Once I switch back to Neon the images scale to fit the screen only the panning and zooming effects don't seem to work now but at least I can see the full image.

(2012-04-15 16:45)Acrobat76 Wrote:  

(2012-04-14 19:40)pkscuot Wrote:  

(2012-04-14 16:36)Acrobat76 Wrote:  First of all, this is a truly great addon!

I run XBMC on ATV2 and Im a bit unsured if and where the images and/or cache are stored? Should I be worried about running out of space on the ATV2? Should I limit the cache size? Any other settings I should tweak in order to suit this addon to the ATV2?

I don't have an ATV2 (or original for that matter), but it looks like the image cache will be stored in:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/userdata/addon_data/script.artistslideshow/ArtistSlideshow/

My cache folder right now is 176mb. I listen to a fair amount of music from a fairly diverse set of artists. YMMV. Given what I know about the ATV2, it's probably worth setting a limit to the cache size. That said, I never tested the cache manager on an ATV, so if you run into problems, post a debug log here so I can look at it.

Thanks, I limited the cache and will see how it goes

So, for the first few days everything was working perfectly, both with and without the cache limitation. However now the slideshow gets stuck on an artist and doesn't move on to the next artist when the song`s artist changes. This should be my debug log, i`m a bit new to xbmc so apologies if i`m missing something obvious

http://pastebin.com/HxSqEfAj

PS. Dont take any notice of the log saying that my xbmc is not eden. It is a minor mod of the latest eden: with small changes relating to the volume control on the apple tv 2 remote as per http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=123115

(2012-04-18 15:46)Acrobat76 Wrote:  So, for the first few days everything was working perfectly, both with and without the cache limitation. However now the slideshow gets stuck on an artist and doesn't move on to the next artist when the song`s artist changes. This should be my debug log, i`m a bit new to xbmc so apologies if i`m missing something obvious

http://pastebin.com/HxSqEfAj

That's the debug log. Thanks for that. As I look through it, it appears to me that for some reason PAPlayer (the process that plays the music) is stopping between songs. On both my systems PAPlayer keeps running and indicates a new track is starting. I'm not sure if that's an AppleTV specific thing, but that's what's causing the issue. ArtistSlideShow checks to see if PAPlayer is playing any audio. If it isn't, it stops (by default at least). Once Artist Slideshow is stopped the only way to restart it is to exit the music visualization screen and go back in.

Having said all that, ronie (the original author) did include an option to have Artist Slideshow keep running even if the music stopped. When I updated the documentation I removed reference to that, as I couldn't figure out a use case that made any sense for that. The good news is that the code is still there. So let's try this:

open up your MusicVisualization.xml file and look for this line (it should be near the top):

<onfocus>RunScript(script.artistslideshow)</onfocus>

replace it with this:


<onfocus>RunScript(script.artistslideshow, daemon=True)</onfocus>

That should force Artist Slideshow to keep running even after PAPlayer stops. Artist Slideshow takes very little processing power (basically zero if it isn't downloading new images), so you shouldn't notice any performance hit. Hopefully that will correct your issue. If it does, I'll add something to the wiki for AppleTV users.

Hi All

Is this great script working on Aeon MQ3 2.0.1 as well? I cant seem to get it working and get the following bug report..

http://pastebin.com/PkiNQkLN

Hopefully someone can help me to get this working

Rgds
Manuel