[MOD] Fanart and more

This should be updated enough to work with Camelot. There are quite a few things that still need sorting out, I'm just sick of having this on my mind. I'll gladly fix any problems up, just let me know. This is a fairly rushed post for what it is, very likely to be problems




Features

• New Fanart View (Library/Files/Games/Comics)
• New Wall view, with DVD, CD and N64/SNES styles
• New Flow view (press down to remove info)
• New Live Place (option to move to Home Blade)
• Mini Video Window
• Recently Added Script Integration (script goes in dash/scripts/)
• Opensubtitles_OSD Script Integration (script goes in dash/scripts/)
• Movies/TV Show buttons on Media Home Blade
• Playlist on Startup (May not work on network audio)
• Rounded corners on covers
• New List Item Thumbnail options (Parent thumb, Disable outline)
• Time on all Blades
• Time on Fullscreen Video
• Custom (Animated) Weather Icons
• Disable GamerCard Focus
• LastFM Love/Hate support (Guide Blade)
• Auto-Scroll Plot (Doesn't seem to be working)
  

All new options are within the Guide Blade, dispersed throughout Personal Settings.

To use Fanart in Games place your fanart in dash/userdata/thumbnails/programs/fanart/ and rename them to the XBE/CUT title with a .jpg extension.
To use fanart in comics place a fanart.jpg in the folder you wish to display it.
To use the Wall views N64/SNES or PSX/Gameboy views simply name the folder with...
N64 games - Nintendo 64
SNES games - Super Nintendo
PSX games - must contain "playstation"
Gameboy games - must contain "gameboy"


DOWNLOAD - Copy (overwrite, when prompted) this over an existing copy of the latest MC360.

You'll need to grab a new textures.xpr due to some of the changes in XBMC. I made 2 version with different Watched and Unwatched overlays. One uses the original MC360 overlays, the other uses the PM3 check marks. Both versions contain extra images for this mod.
Checkmark Textures / Normal Textures (10MB)

Nice will try this after work!!

Looks good in your pics but i don't get any text?

Using the latest Camelot Beta 1 version for the PC..

Grz, LoL

LoL Wrote:Looks good in your pics but i don't get any text?

Using the latest Camelot Beta 1 version for the PC..

Grz, LoL

Just a quick guess for now, but make sure you've extracted the mod into a folder already containing the latest version of MC360 and overwrite. Might be obvious, just making sure.

I've just got internet working at my new house today, so well-timed post, LoL.

Has anyone else managed to get this going or has everyone hit the same stumbling block?

greatant1337 Wrote:Just a quick guess for now, but make sure you've extracted the mod into a folder already containing the latest version of MC360 and overwrite. Might be obvious, just making sure.

I've just got internet working at my new house today, so well-timed post, LoL.

Has anyone else managed to get this going or has everyone hit the same stumbling block?

I had the same problem LoL mentioned above and copying/overwriting the existing MC360 files solved the problem for me. Earlier I just copied the MC360-MOD folder straight to my XBox which resulted in not showing any text at all.
Thanks for your quick reply and it would be great if you could mention this "Overwrite-Procedure" in your first post, as for me this wasn't clear.
I haven't checked many of your new features yet, but if I encounter any problems I'll let you know

Staubsauger Wrote:I had the same problem LoL mentioned above and copying/overwriting the existing MC360 files solved the problem for me. Earlier I just copied the MC360-MOD folder straight to my XBox which resulted in not showing any text at all.
Thanks for your quick reply and it would be great if you could mention this "Overwrite-Procedure" in your first post, as for me this wasn't clear.
I haven't checked many of your new features yet, but if I encounter any problems I'll let you know

Original post updated.

Let me know how this works, what you like, what you hate, what you think should have changed long ago in MC360. Something new in XBMC that MC360 doesn't support?

Forgot to mention that Karaoke should work fine as well.

First of all I'd like to thank you for your awesome Mod!
Now to my suggestions/questions to your Mod:


The Fanart in the background was achieved by putting a file called "Nintendo 64.jpg" into your mentioned UserData/.../fanarts folder. It would be nice, if there was an option to remove the folder picture left of the text. I already had the idea to set a completely transparent thumbnail, but as this is just a folder I couldn't achieve this within xbmc.


The Wall-View for Nintendo64 games works great, but only if I use a folder which includes .CUT files who link to the games. If I use the "Launcher"-plugin and name the folder "Nintendo 64" it still uses the DVD-Aspect ratio for Wall-View. Don't know if this is a bug but for me it works fine with the method using shortcuts.
Another thing in this view is, that the name of the game is quite lost in the left bar - it would be nicer to put it either directly under the "Spielstände"-button or at the bottom of the view.
It would also be nice, if the background would still show the Nintendo64-fanart mentioned in the post above and not just the green standard-background.

I hope you understood everything since, as you probably see in the screenshots, English isn't my native language

Staubsauger Wrote:I hope you understood everything since, as you probably see in the screenshots, English isn't my native language

Loud and clear

- I can add an option to remove the thumbnail from the fanart view. But there's no good way to limit the folders in which the thumbnail wouldn't be displayed. So removing that thumbnail would also remove the thumbnails within the Nintendo 64 folder if you were using the fanart view there too.

You should be able to place a default.tbn (maybe default.jpg) within the Nintendo 64 folder and have that used.

- Unfortunately Launcher doesn't provide the needed info to check what type of games the folder contains.

- I never liked having the title there. It's just all I could come up with. If anyone wants to do a quick mockup of where it should go, without affecting the design philosophy of the MC360 skin, I would gladly change this.

I thought maybe how Wide Icon titles are displayed might work, but that doesn't really leave much room for the actual title. I also entertained putting it in the footer of the screen, between the A,B and X,Y buttons, but nowhere else in the skin is this space used for anything and it felt weird. Directly below Spielstände or Game Saves is just as bad as where it is now with the added problem of possibly confusing people into thinking it's a menu item.

- I didn't think of this scenario, will do.

I should also mention that XBMC now caches thumbnails of CUT files. This allows tonnes of CUTs and thumbs in a folder with no slowdown. r24937
(Example: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=679583)

Also, glad to see someone besides me still uses 4x3. I've probably missed a few things or have some things a little different between 16x9 and 4x3, but 4x3 will be mostly what I wanted.

How do you like the whole Easy-Read thing I've got going?

Putting a transparent .png into the Nintendo64 folder and renaming it to folder.jpg worked - thanks for the hint!

I also made 2 mockups for how I would like the Wall-View:

The second one could affect the design philosophy, since it removes parts of the left menu - as an idea it could fall back into the left design if you hit the "left"-button on the left items of the wall (like in Transparency!, where an menu pops in from the left) [Quite many "left"'s in this sentence ]. I have no idea if this can be achieved within this skin but that's the first idea I came up with and it also shows more Games at the same time. In DVD-Wall View the additional information (like plot, etc.), which was formerly shown in the left bar, could be shown next to the enlarged poster in a semi-transparent field... Let me know how you think about this!

I still only own a 4x3 SD TV and all the new skins developed are made for 720p and up, so the text is hard to read in SD, not to mention the wrong aspect-ratio . Mentioning the text - your Easy-Read feature works good and I haven't thought about disabling it yet. Especially on SD this feature is really important and helps me a lot when sitting on my couch and still being able to read everything nicely - especially when fanart has similar colors to the text.

Is the CUT-thumbnail-cache already in the source-code (r24937) or do I still need to change it manually?

Update:
I figured out a bug in your Easy-Read-Mode, which makes it nearly impossible to point out which file is selected at the moment. I switched the skin-theme to "Carbon" and with enabled Easy-Read it looks like this:

Disabling Easy-Read makes the selection visible again. This also affects the List-View iirc.

Cheers for posting these problems, Staubsauger. I'll get them sorted in the next few days.

Cached CUT thumbs are in SVN/Camelot.

I'm gonna play around with the Wall View some more too.

EDIT: Just tested your Carbon/Easy-Read problem but it works for me. Will investigate further.
Perhaps it's a memory problem. Be sure that you're keeping your fanart small.