[split] Skinning for Kodi
#1
Hey @ronie,

I love the Transparency skin and use it on all my installations! I have a few customizations that I've made that I would like to contribute to the official version (they are small tweaks that would be turned off by default and a skin option would be available to toggle them on). Would you consider adding my options if I did a Github pull request? Please PM me and I can explain what I've added.

Thanks so much for your great work!

Best,
Adam
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#2
i'm always open to contributions from other users :-)
if i add or not it depends on whether the changes are useful for a lot of people.

feel free to submit a PR and explain your changes (and the reason for them) on the pull-request.
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#3
Fantastic! I have three options I would like to add (in order of importance):

1) Hide the TV episode image to prevent spoilers (both when scrolling through the library & when pausing playback)

2) Hide the volume indicator that appears when changing volume during playback

3) Hide the top/mini progress bar when TV/Movie is paused


My modifications basically involve hiding certain UI elements (particularly when pausing playback). If any or all of these are acceptable, let me know and I will work on getting them hooked into the options menu. (If you could share a wiki link that explains how to read from the Skin Options within the template I would appreciate it. I'm assuming that the "General" section is the best place to add these options?)

Thank you again! Getting these changes official will keep me from needing to host my own modified version of the template to share between my installations.
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#4
Some reasoning behind these upgrades:

Option 1) On multiple occasions the episode thumbnail from theTVDB has depicted content with spoilers. I would love to never see those thumbnails (although we could only show them if the episode has been watched, just like the "Hide plot on unwatched episodes" option. For now we can go with the simpler option since I'm pretty new to skinning)

Option 2) All of my TVs have an IR light that lets me know if the volume is going up/down. On my Nvidia Shield, I actually see two different volume indicator bars on screen at once. So I would really like to hide it so that it doesn't take away from the experience for the other viewers not handling the remote. (Not to mention that I can HEAR if the volume is actually going up or down and just find the indicator annoying)

Option 3) I don't immediately like to see how far into a movie/episode I am -- I know if the movie is almost over (or just half-way) that gives away information about what could happen plot-wise. If I really care about how far I am, I just click the "OK" button on the remote to bring up the full controls with the progress bar. So the mini-progress bar when paused only serves to possibly spoil content for me (IMHO), so I prefer to just turn it off and see nothing on-screen when I pause.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need more justification. If you are okay with these three options being added (and turned off by default), I will finish the coding & testing and create a pull request.

Thanks again!
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#5
1) would be nice to have. but it should only hide thumbs for unwatched episodes

2) as far as i know, the double volume bar was fixed in kodi some time ago:
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/8291
if i test it on my android tablet, i never see the kodi volume bar...

3) it's a bit too far fetched imo to add this as an option to transparency!
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#6
Thanks for the feedback ronie!

2) I'm using the latest Kodi 16.1 from the U.S. Google Play store. But I would still opt to hide the volume bar on my main TV (which runs Ubuntu) as I tend to be constantly changing the volume and my family gets annoyed that the on-screen indicator keeps appearing over the content. I'd really like to add this as an option in the menu (turned off by default) -- if I'm very clear with the option title/messaging, would that be okay?

3) Additionally with the mini progress bar, it often covers content at the top of the screen that I'm interested in and there isn't currently a way to hide all on-screen overlays. When I pause I don't like to see any overlays -- I know that the content is paused because it's not moving (if I'm concerned the machine is frozen, I just click enter/ok to bring up the full controls). Having all overlays hidden makes it less jarring to watch when the person with the remote pauses frequently (like myself). When content is paused in VLC Player, there is no progress bar overlay, so I would think many people are used to not seeing overlays when paused. What do you think?
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#7
Hey @ronie! Any feedback on my 2016-06-03 message? I'm making some good progress and was hoping you might reconsider which options I can add to the settings menu.

Thanks!
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#8
i'm interested in option 1, as you might have noticed :-)

2 and 3 are what i consider personal preference and not something i've seen requested often (or at all) before.
therefor it's not something i'd like to add.
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#9
Is there a way I can bury 2 & 3 in the options menu so it's out of the way? Maybe at the bottom of the "View Options" menu? I'll bet that once you've experienced life without all the constant videos overlays popping up, you'll never go back! :-)

On the technical side -- is there a good wiki article or anything that details how to reference the currently playing/selected video's watch status from within the template?

Thanks again!
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#10
@ronie,

I've finished the template updates that remove the spoiler images from the Library view and the Playback overlay. Can you point me to a Wiki page or a previous commit of yours where you wire up changes to an entry in the options menu? (I'm guessing there is some multi-lingual support I need to add as well)? Or I can just create a pull request for the changes I have so far if you'd rather just link it to the settings menu yourself.

Thanks!
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#11
sure go ahead, create a pr and we'll take it from there ;-)
thx!
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#12
Has there been any progress on this at all? I've seen quite a lot of requests for the thumbnails to be removed - similar to the "hide plot of unwatched movies/episodes" option, but the feature has never made it into any release/update. Or am I missing something?

If this is not going to happen easily, is there any way for a skin to "read" the setting to hide plots of unwatched video library titles? If yes, this could be implemented easily by a skinner linking the thumbnail code to this Kodi setting...
OSMC Skinner      |    The OSMC Skin for Kodi v20 Nexus (native 16:9, 21:9 and 4:3 skin, special cinemascope/CIH version available)      |     GitHub: https://github.com/Ch1llb0/skin.osmc
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#13
Nope, I stopped using Kodi due to the sad state of the UPnP library sharing/syncing and switched to Emby. I highly recommend you switch as well.
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#14
Literally a few minutes after asking here, I got it sorted... It's working here now.

No idea why one wants to use UPNP and switch to anything else than Kodi. But whatever suits you. Wink
OSMC Skinner      |    The OSMC Skin for Kodi v20 Nexus (native 16:9, 21:9 and 4:3 skin, special cinemascope/CIH version available)      |     GitHub: https://github.com/Ch1llb0/skin.osmc
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