[goyney]

I'm looking to develop an add-on for Music Video video types only that would take the scraped Artist, Song Name, Album, etc. from a music video and overlay it on the video a few seconds after it had begun playing. It would stay on the screen for a few moments, then fade off. As the end of the video approaches, it would fade back into few for a few moments and fade off right before the video ends.

Simply put: old school music video style.



Is overlaying text on a video possible from an addon?

[pkscout]

I think you're going to have two choices. Either you're going to have to add some window properties via python then modify your skin to launch the script and show the properties (that's how Artist Slideshow works), or your going to have to have the addon create a window (using The WindowXML class) that is mostly transparent that has the info. With the latter option you'd either have to launch the addon before you start the videos or modify the skin to launch the script when the fullscreen music video screen is activated.

[kassan]

XBMC is a great media center with really good plugins, but as long as you press play... there is nothing. No way to display text or images, notifications, overlays without skin modification. I think displaying music video title in "MTV/VIVA style" is a great idea, but I have more:

GENERAL:
- notification about new twitter, FB, RSS messages
- weather alerts
- breaking news

MUSIC VIDEOS:
- trivia from songfacts and artistfacts in VH1 popup video style
- now playing / next video notification

MOVIES:
- mistakes from moviemistakes.com
- social watching notification from trakt.tv
- trivia from IMDB

SERIES:
- trivia from tv.com
- song info from tunefind.com

Is there a way to do this without extra skin modifications? Or maybe one modular addon supported by all skins to "view things"?

[da-anda]

don't hijack the thread kassan. Start your own as feature request or in the python addon section.

@goyney
if you want the dialog to fit the skin you can do two things:
a) fire off a kaitoast
b) feed all info to the listitem in python and show the "info" dialog for a couple of seconds
Best might be to do both, because depending on skin either a) or b) will look good

If you want a custom style for the overlay, you have to mess with the windowXML stuff.

As for the triggering - you could start a python service that is listening to the playback events. And onPlaybackStarted you're checking if the played item is from your addon, if so, start a loop that is polling for the current playback time every X seconds and once it reached the defined margin on begin or end you fire up the dialog.

[Lunatixz]

Curious how its possible to hijack a thread that only has two posts! Needless to say after reading that i lost all energy to help out...

[kassan]

The funny thing is I posted a separated thread earlier HERE, but no one answered

Well, I think I'll make a tablet/smartphone app which displays trivia/quotes/facts etc using "now playing" data from XBMC... but still: song facts in VH1 "nuggets" style or now_playing/playing_next info windows could be a great feature.