Animated Fanart Backgrounds
#1
At the moment the only provision is for jpeg/png images for media backgrounds. Something that would be really interesting would be to allow the media backgrounds to be Animated GIFs. Now I know that this can be interpreted as those cheesy, crude, low res images that are sometimes popular as avatars for the single digit IQ community; but there are people with good Adobe Photoshop and After Effects skills making 'Cinemagraphs'. These are similar to animated GIFs but are usually high res images with only certain portions of the image that has movement. Some of the best examples can be seen here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/thegeshow/the-60...graph-gifs
Would it demand wholesale changes to the existing skins or could it be seen as a cool mod by those 'xml masters' and a step ahead of the multiimage provisions of weather icons Smile
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#2
Those are some trippy gifs!
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#3
Damm nice images. Would be cool to have a few of them as backdrop Wink
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#4
Just bookmarked that page! The movement on the Joker one is so subtle that, at first, I thought the image wasn't animated.
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#5
Video 
There are people out there with imagination Smile The real question is, how hard would it be to include this in media backgrounds, or in fact any backgrounds? How good would these images be as movie fanart:
Image Image
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#6
I've asked for this before: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=96623
Image
thegamesdb.net - An open video games database.
scottbrant.net - Blog
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#7
I've never put in feature suggestions before so I don't know how it works. Do the xml guys look in this section? do they ever comment: "Yes, that's on our to do list" or "No that's not going to happen"? Be good to get some feedback so that one doesn't feel they are wasting their time
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#8
Moving backgrounds (gif or otherwise) is something that has been discussed before, but I don't know if anyone is formally working on it right now.
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#9
Animated GIF at HD resolutions is woefully inefficient.
It would be far better to have a regular movie clip as the background (i.e. using video compression).

The principle of a 'mostly static' image is quite nice though.
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#10
(2012-09-28, 13:14)AnalogKid Wrote: Animated GIF at HD resolutions is woefully inefficient.
It would be far better to have a regular movie clip as the background (i.e. using video compression).

The principle of a 'mostly static' image is quite nice though.

If it's indeed as you say, then a similar suggestion was already made. For my part it's not a feature I would use, I prefer a simple content-centric layout, I think this moving parts would be too much of a distraction.
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#11
(2012-09-28, 13:14)AnalogKid Wrote: Animated GIF at HD resolutions is woefully inefficient.
It would be far better to have a regular movie clip as the background (i.e. using video compression).

The principle of a 'mostly static' image is quite nice though.
True, but if you were to create the images from dvd video or even m2ts, edit the static image and mask in photoshop, it doesn't have to be rendered as an animated GIF, it could be a simple mp4 and cause it to loop. I just tested this with the pulp fiction above. It was over 300Kb as a GIF and less than 100Kb as an mp4. It really isn't a question of which format so much as can it be done and used by those that like it. I would hazard a guess that for the majority of users, it would be seen as an enhancement rather than a distraction
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#12
I thought i have seen something like this in the past for a certain skin but can't find it anymore. Only thing i could find is this http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=119141
and
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=106498

Not the thing we want but looks like it.
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#13
check out the animated (flash) art backdrops here for more inspiration. Smile

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/?-
Image
thegamesdb.net - An open video games database.
scottbrant.net - Blog
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#14
Hahaha. Fireplace.mp4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrSiXjWzr-g

Kidding aside, the wiki says:
In this case, we support only animated GIF. There are also some animated gifs that may not work. Use ImageReady CS and make sure you set the gif-anim to “restore to background” and they should work fine.

I gave this a quick shot but it didn't work.
Image [RELEASE] Metroid
Image [RELEASE] IrcChat
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#15
I've added giflib to xbmc, currently only textures, e.g., backgrounds work: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/4474 .
Please let me know if you need test builds.
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