[akovia]

Hi,
I'm an admin over at fanart.tv and we were approached by a skin dev for mediabrowser about storing dvd back covers for a skin he's developed.
http://forum.fanart.tv/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=44

The teaser he made looks pretty slick but I wanted to gauge interest from other skin developers if they think they would ever use this art. I would hate to open up an entire section for a single skin dev, and If anyone else would use this, I'd like to get their input so I could make the rules for the section that allow for easy skin integration.

So far it's proposed to make a full dvd cover (front/spine/back) that could be accessed like a sprite.
The dimensions would be..front and back 1000x1426, spine 95x1426 with a total of 2095x1426

Please feel free to jump into the discussion there or reply here if there's any input at all.

Many Thanks,
Akovia

[`Black]

I understand that some might like that but in my opinion physical discs and therefore the existence of back covers will die anyway. Also the movie information dialog in XBMC is sort of like a (more advanced) back cover anyway because it holds all the information about the director, actors, plot, codecs etc.

PS: The ideal format for movie posters is 2:3. That's the standard on themoviedb and e.g. iTunes.

[Martijn]

I think indeed now that physical disk are dying out and the fact that skinners are likely to just create a cover themselves too much trouble to go through and moderate.
Most of the new ones will become custom made any way and no way reflecting the actual covers like the discart already does.

[akovia]

Thanks guys.
In his video he did an overlay for where there were missing art for the backs, which actually I liked better. Kinda like an ipod when you flip the album cover to see the tracks.

I was thinking maybe instead of a stock back cover there could be some sort of template where movie info could go, or just a textless cover that could have a semi-transparent info overlay.
It would allow more freedom for cover browsers to use more of the screen and would still allow for spine browsers as well which has been a common request. (Bookshelf Browser mode)

Anyway, thank you both for the input. Valid points indeed which I was looking for.
Feel free to request any categories you would like to see that we don't already have.

[Kode]

I don't think physical media is going to go anywhere soon.

[removed151214]

I can't see any particular use for this personally, but if you do decide to implement it I'd ask that you do it that you do it as three separate images (front, spine and back), as the XBMC skinning GUI doesn't make it easy to split up one large image into separate components.

[Kode]

It will be 1 image, otherwise we would have to try and link them in some way which would be a nightmare, plus if XBMC aren't going to use the image anyway it doesn't matter.

[akovia]

BTW, we now have over 5k posters available in our DB and I see no sign of it slowing down. Just a heads up if anyone wants to support them to download through XBMC.
We have both text and textless posters accessible via the api.