2012-06-29, 02:35
Hey talented skinners!
If you read this - http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=134943 - you will see that my Add-on:XSqueeze (wiki) means that XBMC can actually do synchronised multi-room music playback fairly easily now - something that has long been missing & requested in XBMC. It's a hack (XBMC spawns a hidden external audio player that emulates a Squeezebox) - but it's an effective one as the Squeezebox players already have a very effective and easy sync/sync group mechanism.
Important to note - no extra hardware required - you do NOT need any actual hardware Squeezeboxes, just a simple server program to server your music library from your server/NAS/plug etc = and then install an addon in XBMC and away you go.
What would be super nice would be more skin support - because XSqueeze uses it's own window.xml, it runs into all the normal issues of needing skin files/font care for other skins. It's usually functional no matter what the skin, but I'm no designer and it's fairly basic even in Confluence.
(Integral to XSqueeze is the Artist Slideshow add on - the addon kicks off the Artist Slideshow automatically so you just need to add a multi-image and a label and all the nice pics/artist info just work).
The addon is pretty stable now and so you should need to do much in the way of future changes - i.e. no great bit ongoing support burden here. The skin labels etc. are well documented - just install XSqueeze (see wiki link above to get my repo etc) - and then in the the addons/script.xsqueeze/resources/skins/Default/ folder have a look at XSqueezeNowPlaying.xml - at the top is a list of all the available labels and what they do. The companion (automatically installed) addon XSqueezeChooser is launched from within XSquueze, and uses a basic xbmc plugin architecture to help people easily select music. It therefore picks up all your normal skin stuff like any other list based plug-in - although it (like the YouTube addon etc) - does try to force the id=500 view for thumbnail display once you get to a list of actual albums/radio stations etc. So ideally your skin has a thumbnails view for plugins with an id of 500 like Confluence does....
It would be totally awesome if you added support in your skin - you can simply skin it up and then add your own XSqueezeNowPlaying.xml into your 720p folder when you next do a release of your skin, or share a skin file here and I can add it within the XSqueeze addon skin folders.
If you do get around to this - post here, as it would be great to see your work and I can prettify up the wiki page with some sexy shots....
If you read this - http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=134943 - you will see that my Add-on:XSqueeze (wiki) means that XBMC can actually do synchronised multi-room music playback fairly easily now - something that has long been missing & requested in XBMC. It's a hack (XBMC spawns a hidden external audio player that emulates a Squeezebox) - but it's an effective one as the Squeezebox players already have a very effective and easy sync/sync group mechanism.
Important to note - no extra hardware required - you do NOT need any actual hardware Squeezeboxes, just a simple server program to server your music library from your server/NAS/plug etc = and then install an addon in XBMC and away you go.
What would be super nice would be more skin support - because XSqueeze uses it's own window.xml, it runs into all the normal issues of needing skin files/font care for other skins. It's usually functional no matter what the skin, but I'm no designer and it's fairly basic even in Confluence.
(Integral to XSqueeze is the Artist Slideshow add on - the addon kicks off the Artist Slideshow automatically so you just need to add a multi-image and a label and all the nice pics/artist info just work).
The addon is pretty stable now and so you should need to do much in the way of future changes - i.e. no great bit ongoing support burden here. The skin labels etc. are well documented - just install XSqueeze (see wiki link above to get my repo etc) - and then in the the addons/script.xsqueeze/resources/skins/Default/ folder have a look at XSqueezeNowPlaying.xml - at the top is a list of all the available labels and what they do. The companion (automatically installed) addon XSqueezeChooser is launched from within XSquueze, and uses a basic xbmc plugin architecture to help people easily select music. It therefore picks up all your normal skin stuff like any other list based plug-in - although it (like the YouTube addon etc) - does try to force the id=500 view for thumbnail display once you get to a list of actual albums/radio stations etc. So ideally your skin has a thumbnails view for plugins with an id of 500 like Confluence does....
It would be totally awesome if you added support in your skin - you can simply skin it up and then add your own XSqueezeNowPlaying.xml into your 720p folder when you next do a release of your skin, or share a skin file here and I can add it within the XSqueeze addon skin folders.
If you do get around to this - post here, as it would be great to see your work and I can prettify up the wiki page with some sexy shots....
