New user and adding items to home screen
#1
Go easy on me, long time media centre user installed with mytv and mediabrowser, now making the jump to xbmc

Win7 Professional PC under the TV
Default confluence skin latest xbmc build
Synology 212j NAS box (shares access as SMB from xbmx)

Th main issue is adding items to the home screen, I have my films organised in a top level films folder then one below with childrens films and mum and dad films etc. I have added the films to xbmc, and like others i wanted to add items to the home page. in the end i made the shares "childrens films" and mum and dad films" into favourites - then added an item in home.xml to point to the favorite (getting the location string from favorites in the userdata folder)i now get these on my home screen, so i am almost there. However i have some questions.

  1. Is it possible to add a "recently added" to these favourites that are now on the home screen just like the one in movies. I want to hide the movies and videos home screen items but i would like to see new items (for instance the last 4 added) to any of these newly added "favourite" items on the home screen. I want to see them as the kids tend to watch the recently added more often :-)
  2. I am using a remote and when i am in a favourite and use "back" i go through the file structure - is it easy to stop this happening, so when in my favourite and i press back it takes me to the home screen rather than the file structure? i think it is but i cannot figure it out.I think its actually the easiest bit to do, i just dont know how!
  3. Is there a way to PIN protect my favourites? I don't want to set up profiles but i don't want my 5 year old accidentally clicking mum and dad films and firing up something like Die Hard! I just want a simple pin not a separate profile.

xbmc has come a long way since the last time i tried it BUT it is not that easy to customise and i cant figure out who it is aimed at. I was kind of expecting a way to add an item to the HOME screen without editing xml files and I thought you would easily be able to add libraries - classify them as "movies" or "TV Shows" give them a library name and add that library to the home screen separating out the different kind of media, and different intended target audience but I cant see how you can.

On the upside its fast - a lot faster than the mediabrowser and mytv add ins for MCE, no messing around with multiple codecs and it seems to work well.

Please feel free to tell me i am doing it the hard way, or that I can't do what i want in xbmc, or that i am obviously a numpty and should be using something else!

John R
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#2
I'd like to know the answer to your first question myself (adding a recently added widget to a custom home menu), and how to create submenu to custom menu, so thanks for posting this.
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#3
1) there's no easy way, use a different skin or one of the Confluence mods that support recent items widget for custom menu items
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#4
Well i have installed the confluence customisable mod and that seems to fix the biggie with regards to adding items to the home screen! Once i figured out to add an item as a node then browse to file structure it just worked.

For users who want to manage via their existing file structure then adding items has to be easy.

I have added recent items to these nodes but not figured out how to get it to show just the items in that node yet so i will head over there and see whether it can be done!

John
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#5
Could you explain to us how you managed to add widgets? I have the modded confluence and I just edited the home.xml file in order to have a custom menu. Custom nodes you say. Will have to look into that!
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#6
(2013-07-05, 09:57)evillevi Wrote: Could you explain to us how you managed to add widgets? I have the modded confluence and I just edited the home.xml file in order to have a custom menu. Custom nodes you say. Will have to look into that!



Well I am not in front of the pc at the moment but it is in the skin options somewhere under menu items i modified one of the menu items and under type called it a node you then specify the folder path when prompted and bingo!

John R
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