xTV Wrap View Mod using FanArt Backdrops

I've tried several skins, but keep going back to the xTV skin. I'd love to have fanart, but I really like the list view, since I can quickly scan my eyes down a long list and see the movies that appeal to me and quickly scroll to the one I want. Would you be willing to create a list view with fanart?

I'm thinking that the list text would be superimposed on the fanart, and would probably require that you use a white font with black shadow (or black font with white edging) so as to allow for the text to be legible when the fanart has a lot of white (or black) in the section where the list text would be.

I'm not sure that coverart would even be necessary, but one idea would be to have a small coverart thumb in the lower left, with movie description information to the right of it, all superimposed over the full-screen fanart.

If you would be willing to give this a shot, I would be very appreciative.

OK, it's been about a week so I'm going to bump this in regards to my request. Can someone perhaps tell me if what I am requesting would be fairly easy for me to do myself? It seems like all it would require is to mod the List view to remove the DVD coverart, and add in a background fanart image (though I suspect that replacing the white font with a white w/black shadow font or black with white outline font could be the trickiest part).

Scott R Wrote:OK, it's been about a week so I'm going to bump this in regards to my request. Can someone perhaps tell me if what I am requesting would be fairly easy for me to do myself? It seems like all it would require is to mod the List view to remove the DVD coverart, and add in a background fanart image (though I suspect that replacing the white font with a white w/black shadow font or black with white outline font could be the trickiest part).

If you check my mod files and read my posts in this thread, you should be able to easily figure out what to do... Basically, find the ListView section in the file, comment out the dvd coverart section, and add a line for the fanart... (Use PC_XBMC to test it, it is simpler than transferring files for every change...)

It is so obvious, I'll let you do it...



If you are having trouble, post help request and I will help you.
good luck

Thanks for the suggestions/encouragement Kris. I'll give that a shot. One question about your mod: Is this only supposed to work in Files mode? I switched to Library mode and the Wrap view looks like the old Wrap view, whereas in Files mode, the Wrap view looks like the screenshots you've provided in this thread.

I don't mean to hijack this thread (if anyone else is interested in my adventure, I'm wondering if perhaps I should start a new thread?), but I did want to report back that I made some progress. First, I discovered the "missing link" that I bemoaned in my last post. In MyVideo.xml the references in the "fanart" block which state "Control.HasFocus(54)" the "54" is referencing the id assigned to the Wrap view in the CommonViewTypes.xml file. So I added an "OR" for id "50" (List view) and that seemed to work. I was a bit confused by the use of brackets as parentheses (assuming I got that right), but I think that's working.

Now I just need to figure out how to:
1) Remove the DVD coverart (not sure where that's referenced).
2) Do something about the list text font so that it shows up well when the white text is overlayed over white sections of fanart (my previous suggestions about black shadows is one idea I probably won't be able to do, but I expect that I can add a dark rectangular block behind the list text column that will somewhat darken the fanart image behind it).

Just one final note to say that I created a new thread about my quest to create a List view w/fanart here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=45020

If anyone is interested in that, we can continue the conversation there. Kris_Toff, or anyone else with skinning experience, I still have some questions about how to do some things, so I would certainly appreciate any help you're willing to provide. Thanks!

< Moderator: Delete me >

Scott R Wrote:Thanks for the suggestions/encouragement Kris. I'll give that a shot. One question about your mod: Is this only supposed to work in Files mode? I switched to Library mode and the Wrap view looks like the old Wrap view, whereas in Files mode, the Wrap view looks like the screenshots you've provided in this thread.

Sorry haven't been around much (obviously)...
To answer your question, this mod works in Files mode only. I have 100's of movies organized by folders (some password protected) and the library mode screws up the organization I want. Plus, library mode seems to take too much memory when launching some movies...

Hahaha. A lot has happened since you last checked in. A while back I took your code and made my own list-view mod with fanart. Then wyrm went crazy modding the xTV skin and made use of my code (or at least my suggestion) and added this logic to his xTV SAF skin.