2010-04-24, 13:21
I am a longtime user of XBMC, remembering fondly (and nervously) modding my first Xbox and installing XMP. Years later and I have a Revo 3610 with XBMC Live in the lounge, XBMC for Windows on my laptop and XBMC for Windows on another PC.
I have long wanted to help with development of XBMC; finally I have checked out the code, got a development environment up and going, and have been reading through the code trying to understand it. I wanted something small that I could try my hand at initially, something that I would personally find useful but also something that would hopefully be accepted eventually by the dev team. I looked through Trac and then spotted #9103. Perfect!
I have been looking through the code, trying to find out how the watched state is currently handled and how the setting is read/updated. I have an understanding of this now, and a basic concept in mind of how it could work. But I have a few questions first.
1. Would a patch for this be something likely to be accepted by the devs? The only reason I hesitate with this is that it is the first time I can see that the video settings would be different for TV Shows vs Movies, and I am not sure what other changes might be in the works for this.
2. As far as I can see, any change to support this would require support in the skin as well as xbmc code. What is the teams attitude to this? To be avoided by a newbie?
3. Broadly speaking I would propose replacing watchmode in the settings file, and introducing two new Xml elements to replace it - something like watchmodetv and watchmodemovies. watchmode is actually an integer, so in theory it could be extended to support all the permutations of watch mode for movies and tvshows, however most skins (including Confluence) just treat it like a bool which would no longer work.
Obviously some additional code would be required to then filter the item list based on whether they are episodes or movies, and a new button control id for skins.
I like this feature request because I would find it really useful myself. After reading it, I realised the reason I never use the "Hide Watched" feature is because I want all my movies to be displayed all the time, but only show unwatched TV shows just as the creator of the Trac item suggests.
Any comments appreciated.
I have long wanted to help with development of XBMC; finally I have checked out the code, got a development environment up and going, and have been reading through the code trying to understand it. I wanted something small that I could try my hand at initially, something that I would personally find useful but also something that would hopefully be accepted eventually by the dev team. I looked through Trac and then spotted #9103. Perfect!
I have been looking through the code, trying to find out how the watched state is currently handled and how the setting is read/updated. I have an understanding of this now, and a basic concept in mind of how it could work. But I have a few questions first.
1. Would a patch for this be something likely to be accepted by the devs? The only reason I hesitate with this is that it is the first time I can see that the video settings would be different for TV Shows vs Movies, and I am not sure what other changes might be in the works for this.
2. As far as I can see, any change to support this would require support in the skin as well as xbmc code. What is the teams attitude to this? To be avoided by a newbie?
3. Broadly speaking I would propose replacing watchmode in the settings file, and introducing two new Xml elements to replace it - something like watchmodetv and watchmodemovies. watchmode is actually an integer, so in theory it could be extended to support all the permutations of watch mode for movies and tvshows, however most skins (including Confluence) just treat it like a bool which would no longer work.
Obviously some additional code would be required to then filter the item list based on whether they are episodes or movies, and a new button control id for skins.
I like this feature request because I would find it really useful myself. After reading it, I realised the reason I never use the "Hide Watched" feature is because I want all my movies to be displayed all the time, but only show unwatched TV shows just as the creator of the Trac item suggests.
Any comments appreciated.