[Rudepooch]

hey,

i have a couple requests regarding thumbnails- i dunno if anyone else thinks these are good ideas- let's hear your impressions...

1. there should be a way of hiding "folder.jpg" in the 'my pictures' section. it would be better if they didn't come up while scrolling through the pictures or viewing a slideshow.

2. there should be a wildcard for associating the .tbn file with other files. something like *.tbn associates the .tbn file with all files in the folder, *.avi.tbn with all the .avi's int the folder, and u2*.tbn associates with all the files that start with u2. obviously '*' is not a valid character in a filename, so swomething like '|' could be used instead, or som other character that is univerally allowable but seldom used. i use an icon for my television folders that have the logo for the show floating over a folder for the folder icon(folder.jpg), and a modified version of the icon without the folder for the actual .avi files (filename.tbn). just for clarity sake i am not talking about the current 'my music' section thumbnail functionality where the thumbnail is carried over to the files in the folder (which is great by the way). a wildcard would save me having to make hundreds of copies of thumbnails and renaming them one by one, and also make it possible to have several icons in a given folder- say one for .avi's one for .mpeg's and one for .mov's (or whatever- you get the idea.)

3. for some reason, .tbn and folder.jpg are not retrieved from iso and udf discs in the dvd drive. it would be nice if the same functionality could be extended to them as with everything else. i have some storage issues and i use the iso bookmark so that i can have television programs, movies, pictures, and music that are on dvds that both my computer and xbox can read.

it would also be nice if there was some sort of a 'no text' option for thumbs...

for instance if you have a thumb for your "action movies" folder that actually says action movies, the text is redundant. the would great with the wide icon stuff happening over at the blackbolt mc 360 forum. it would probably have to be implimented via a tag in the bookmark... <notext/>?

any thoughts?

[SleepyP]

good post.
1-i second that, it seems like a good candidate for something to add to Settings > My Pictures. it would definitely make it more intuitive.
2-it took me a bit to understand precisely what you mean, but now that i get it, it does seem like a good idea. the more advanced stuff like something*something else.tbn is probably more hairy to code & debug, but the basic wildcard stuff seems like a really smart way to go, assuming * is allowed under FATX. if you know C++, you might want to give the source a look
3-seems like a bug?
4-the no text is already implemented, see the manual's section on the thumbnailpanel control

[jgawera]

Maybe you could have a thumbinfo.xml file in the folder with all of your rules for various thumbs in it.
Youl could then have any wildcard characters etc that you want, you could specify an order your filters should be applied in. Otherwise, in your example, if you had u2Songs.avi, does it get the u2 thumb or the avi thumb?

If you had your thumbinfo.xml you could have something like.
<thumbinfo>
<folderthumb>folder.jpg</folderthumb>
<defaultthumb>default.jpg<defaultthumb>

<thumb patern="Star Trek TOS*.avi" thumb="Star Trek TOS.jpg"/>
<thumb patern="Star Trek TNG*.avi" thumb="Star Trek TNG.jpg"/>
<thumb patern="Star Trek DS9*.avi" thumb="Star Trek DS9.jpg"/>
<thumb patern="Star Trek Voyager*.avi" thumb="Star Trek Voyager.jpg"/>
<thumb patern="Star Trek Enterprise*.avi" thumb="Star Trek Enterprise.jpg"/>
<thumb patern="Star Trek*.avi" thumb="Star Trek.jpg"/>
<thumb patern="*.avi" thumb="avithumb.jpg"/>
</thumbinfo>

So "Star Trek DS9 S07E09.avi" gets "Star Trek DS9.jpg" as it's thumb
And "Star Trek Bloopers.avi" gets "Star Trek.jpg" as it's thumb.
And "Star Wars.avi" gets "avithumb.jpg"
And "Space Balls.mpg" gets "default.jpg"
The folder containing all of these gets folder.jpg

Obviously this needs a little more thought.
Some issues might be:
-Parsing XML is slow, maybe go for a simpler flat file type format
-XBMC users might not want to edit files just to get nice thumbs set up.
-Maybe leave out the <folderthumb> tag, otherwise when viewing a directory with lots of sub directories, XBMC will have to parse one file for each directory.
-Don't break the current system, if people have DVDs with all of their thumbs set up, these shoudl still work just fine in XBMC
-Do people really keep a large variety of media in one folder. Maybe the above is a bad example, But I would definately keep each of the above star treks in separate folders. And probably a sub folder for each season aswell.
-Maybe have one master XML file and one batch of thumbs in a central location. XBMC uses this for all directories. (not sure I like this, but hey, what do I know)
-The current system is simple to understand filename.avi filename.tbn

Just some food for thought, I hope there's a good idea in there somewhere

[Rudepooch]

Is there any way to confirm the ignoring of .tbn's and folder.jpg on an iso or udf disc in the DVD is actually a bug??

Should it be posted to the bugs section?

I like the idea of an icons.xml that would allow you to set your icons/thumbs for anything and everything, however; it would be much easier to just drop a thumbnail named _.tbn to be used for every file into the folder with the files you want to thumb. An xml would probably allow way more functionality though.

Could there be a "Hide folder.jpg in 'My Pictures'" setting in the picture settings?? Seems like an easy fix- but what do I know.. (not alot, lol!)

Glad to see that ppl think it might be a good idea though...

[SleepyP]

i also feel that making some sort of config file is kindof like hunting a deer with a nuke, way overkill...

i've been too busy to bulk up on my C++ still, so i can't say for sure, but the "ignore folder.jpg" option sounds pretty easy to do from a programming standpoint.
ostensibly, when a directory is browsed into XBMC populates an array with the files in the current directory, then does its stuff. i figure all you'd need to do is add a logic fork right after the array gets populated which, if the setting is "true", scans the array for folder.jpg and removes it if found.
i am still not beyond the most basic C++ projects ('hello world'), so don't expect me to implement this one

[kraqh3d]

1. An option to hide folder.jpg from within a picture folder may be possible to do without much trouble. XBMC already filters whats displayed by extension. I'd have to take a look and see if the functions used can accomodate a full name or not.

2. Some kind of regexp based matching system like jgawera suggested is possible though im not sure what impact it would have on speed. but an alternative would be to generalize the popup "artist thumb chooser" so that a user could pick a thumb for any file. it'll take longer to pick the same thumb for 100 episodes so an option may be to allow "marking" of multiple files like the file manager supports. (the problem with this is that only a single "highlight" is allowed. in the non-filemanager windows that highlight color is used to mark the currently playing file.)

[elupus]

thumb from iso is likely disabled since it took too much time to load. should be less of a trouble now thou since we load thumbs async. probably could be enabled again

[spiff]

added the hide folder.jpg thing. i see no reason to do it optional though.

[Rudepooch]

Wicked to hear that the folders.jpg is hidden. Sounds like a wildcard might be out for the thumbs though? I still think it would be cool to be able to do _.tbn for all the files in a folder at least. Of course the programming end of it is way beyond me- so if it happens great if not, well XBMC is still my fav soft.

[Rudepooch]

Haven't seen any discussion on this in a bit-

What is involved in re-enabling the thumbs on an iso? Can I do it myself? Is it just a setting?

Is there any chance of seeing a wildcard for thumbs; or maybe just _.tbn is a thumbnail for all files in the folder?

Also had an idea about bookmark sort order- see my other post...

[kay.one]

so are thumbnails in DVDs gonna be re-enabled anytime soon, or its technically impossible or really hard to implement, i would really appreciate any info on this

thanks.

[timdog82001]

I would be very interested in seeing that wildcard thing implemented, if possible. I've thought about that for a long time.

[kraqh3d]

are you sure thumbs are disabled for files on dvd? i didnt realize this. it should be re-enabled. the thumb loader runs asyncronously. i recently added code to show a folder.jpg (though its configurable via advancedsettings.xml) found in the root of a disc as the dvd icon when at the root bookmark listing. (nothing inherits this image. it only replaces the dvd icon.)

[kay.one]

can you please let us know when its re-enabled, so we can update our XBMC!



Thanks alot.

[Rudepooch]

Just thought I'd give this one a bump to see if there has been any thought about it. I would really like to see the wildcard thingy. Unfortunately the extent of my coding is a little xml, a very little, so it's outa my league.

Anyone interested in taking it on?