[Robotica]

Great work! You probably have seen the FFMPEG update, which's support decoding and demuxing animated gif's.

There is a PR for this now but it has the same problem (black screens in between transitions) as this solution. Is this behaviour already fixed?

[leechguy]

By 'black screen between transistions', do you mean between the end of the movie and it restarting (looping)? That has been fixed. If you mean the black background you see when I select the Music menu item in the youtube movie (at ~13 seconds), that cannot be easily be fixed. What happens there is that a different skin xml file is loaded, which happens to have the same movie background. During the transition of the old skin xml to the new one, the movie is stopped and started again.

[Ace]

Do you have a public repo? I would love to test it with gifs.

[Skank]

This looks quite good..
Is this being worked on?

[leechguy]

@ace20022

I picked this up again now that I have some time. I had to uplift everything and unfortunately, DVDPlayer doesn't really like to be used as a background player so I abondoned that track today. Tonight, I took oldnemesis' karaoke video background as a basis and am now building on top of this.
There's still a lot that needs to be done. Currently it's a quick 'n dirty hack to serve as a proof of concept.

Anyway, it is working with the mp4 file that I was using before. I also tried with an animated gif that I got from this thread and that works as well (apart from the water moving about two or three times too quickly).

The control is called "videobackground", but I'm considering to refactor this to "video" in line with the "image" control.

The following is from my modified Confluence skin (IncludesBackgroundBuilding.xml). Adding the "videobackground" control was all that was needed to put the video on the background. Cool stuff

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<includes>
        <include name="CommonBackground">
                <control type="image">
                        <description>Normal Default Background Image</description>
                        <left>0</left>
                        <top>0</top>
                        <width>1280</width>
                        <height>720</height>
                        <aspectratio>scale</aspectratio>
                        <texture>$INFO[Skin.CurrentTheme,special://skin/backgrounds/,.jpg]</texture>
                        <visible>![Skin.HasSetting(UseCustomBackground) + !IsEmpty(Skin.String(CustomBackgroundPath))]</visible>
                        <include>VisibleFadeEffect</include>
                </control>
                <control type="videobackground">
                        <description>Normal Default Background Video</description>
                        <left>0</left>
                        <top>0</top>
                        <width>1280</width>
                        <height>720</height>
                        <!--filename>special://skin/backgrounds/bond_by_pan11235-d5xdrbp.gif</filename-->
                        <filename>special://skin/backgrounds/Free Abstract Blue HD Looping Background 1080p.mp4</filename>
                        <visible>!Player.HasVideo + !Skin.HasSetting(ShowBackgroundVideo) + ![Window.IsVisible(PVR) + [Control.IsVisible(11) | Control.IsVisible(12)]]</visible>
                </control>

Once I have things cleaned up/refactored a bit I'll upload it to my repo on github.

[Ace]

Great!

[Rick-Alvin]

I appreciate your knowledge for furnishing such a nice and valuable information. Thanks a lot and pray to God to shower his blessings upon you for your great Efforts..


Video Backdrops

[warlion]

this will look amazing for the conditional Weather

[schumi2004]

@leechguy
Are you still working on this?
Is there a patch available for testing purpose?

[leechguy]

Sometimes you think you have time, but you don't. Other times you have time but don't feel like coding

I've created a separate repository for the modified confluence skin: skin.videoconfluence. The reason for doing so is that I do not intend to do any PR on changes in Confluence. I'm not a skinner and at the moment do not have the ambition to become one. To test things out I may need to make changes to the skin every now and then, so I thought it would be more convenient to have a separate repository for that.
I don't know if the changes I made are correct, but they have the intended result. Like I said, I'm not a skinner. Lot's of trial 'n error here... The only file that has changed is the IncludesBackgroundBuilding.xml file.

The modifications to the XBMC source can be found in the videobackground branch. The player used for playing the movie/animated GIF (both work) is based on the Karaoke player that is already part of XBMC. So far I have compiled and tested on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Since the player does not use hardware acceleration, I do not expect this to work well on a Raspberry Pi, although I guess that the animated GIF should work.


Please be aware of the following topic [MUST READ] What should and what should not be discussed in this developer forum?, especially bullet 4. Don't expect any binary releases from me.
This may sound a bit harsh, but I'd rather be clear. Time is like money; you can only spend it once. I'd rather spend it working on this instead of spending it on supporting people. That will of course change once the code and solution matures. That is, if it matures because XBMC is not designed for doing this background video playing thing. Let's find out if it can be stretched far enough to make this work.

[cezar]

This is very nice idea friend.
If im good understend now will be possible have animation backgrund on any part skin; example if im will be in music part will be possible setup video ? and this soem way will be on other part ?

Whot files suport this skin : mp4, avi ; wmw ?

[leechguy]

At the moment skins are limited to using static pictures in the background. This makes it possible to play video and animated GIFs in the background instead of showing a static picture. Animated fanart for example, see this thread for some examples.

It can play anything FFmpeg can play: gif, mp4, avi, etc. It's video only, no audio because that would be annoying when you're listening to your favourite music.

[axlt2002]

Hi leechguy!

I came to this thread through my wish to find a way to have an animated background in Kodi.

My question is: is this approach still valid? I have tried it by replacing the IncludesBackgroundBuilding.xml file in the burrent RC3 of Kodi 15.2 but without success...black screen in the background instead of the video.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Wanilton]

@axlt2002, Kodi jarvis now have support for animated background, using animated gif.

[axlt2002]

Thanks Wanilton for the reply.

I have just tried it on Isengard 15.2 RC3 but it does not work...any advise? I have just enabled the custom background and selected one animated .gif

It seems strange that this should work on a previous version (Helix) and not in the current one (Isengard)...the video you posted is about Jarvis, right?