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[WIP] XBMC Beginners Guide (PDF)
#31
Thank you for your efforts so far. I highly recommend that you stay with the PDF format. I HATE wiki's with every fiber of my being. They are horrible to navigate through, not easily downloadable to be viewed offline, and generally simply a mess of useless information.
I could go on and on about the defects of wiki's. A book format is certainly the very best for a beginner to understand.
I will review your pdf in more detail later, but I wanted to recommend to you that you add into the very first pages a keyboard list of commands for the beginner. Others have mentioned the importance of staying with key commands, but that is no help to a beginner if they do not actually know what those commands are!
I tore my hair out numerous times finding the list of keyboard commands, I found them once, and now cannot find them a second time! The search routine on this forum is less than useless, so a beginner needs pertinent information right up front. You also need to tell people to RIGHT mouse click to open menu's, or hit the context button "C"
Maybe you did tell them already, but I did not see it <S>
Thank you once again.
-Stampee
#32
I wish I had this when I started.....

One Suggestion....Lose the watermark, It adds too much to each pages load time.
#33
Dear Sir: Some of my following comments have been mentioned before, but... I hope you find this helpful. I include your statement's in "quotes " so you can see what I am referring too.

page 18: "Ok. We now have given XBMC a media source. It knows we have media files in a folder, but what is in there? This screen lets us tell XBMC what kind of files are in the folder we just added."
NOTE: You need to tell the beginner how to get to this screen first!
Right mouse click on your movies name and select SET CONTENT from the sub menu, or use the context key "C" from your keyboard

page 19: "(End of Page/final paragraph)" At this point you may wish to tell people how to view the Library mode. (move mouse to left of screen to pop up the mode menu etc)Also they need to know that to add new movies and manually scrape them they need to exit/disable Library mode to get back to the default movies mode of XBMC (the one they have been using so far) Or just say something like please refer to page 27 and page 30 in this manual.

page 23: "Next thing is selecting the content."

NOTE: Once again, they are beginners, Don't forget to tell them how to get this menu open. "C" key,or right mouse click.

NOTE: In your TV section you may wish to make a meantion that TV series names must be written in a logical manner so that the scraper can find the information for each episode. I tore my hair out trying to get scrape to work on various series until I renamed their episodes into a logical manner. You could just say refer to advanced manual if you are having problem scraping Tv series.
For your own knowledge I found the following series names work well for scraping.

Babylon 5 S03E09 - Point of No Return (meaning season3 episode9 for example)
Crusade.1x01_war_Zone
McHales Navy S1E01
S01E01 - The Greatest American Hero (1)
The_Love_Boat_S1E0x1
seaquest.dsv.2x02.daggers.part.2.xvi

notice the words are seperated by . _ or spaces and the scraper does not care, it still read the names fine and scrapped the content.

THANK YOU once again for the effort
-stampee
#34
Wow, it looks pretty slick. My only suggestion would be to add a glossary at the end to define terms like scraping, OSD, Calibration, etc. That way you can refer people to that section for the terms when they are first used.
#35
stampee Wrote:page 18: "Ok. We now have given XBMC a media source. It knows we have media files in a folder, but what is in there? This screen lets us tell XBMC what kind of files are in the folder we just added."
NOTE: You need to tell the beginner how to get to this screen first!
Right mouse click on your movies name and select SET CONTENT from the sub menu, or use the context key "C" from your keyboard

Nope.. not anymore... The new dharma automatically goes to that screen after adding a media source.

stampee Wrote:page 19: "(End of Page/final paragraph)" At this point you may wish to tell people how to view the Library mode. (move mouse to left of screen to pop up the mode menu etc)Also they need to know that to add new movies and manually scrape them they need to exit/disable Library mode to get back to the default movies mode of XBMC (the one they have been using so far) Or just say something like please refer to page 27 and page 30 in this manual.

In the manual we will only refer to keyboard commands. So no more mouse moves to the far left or right, just the keys on the keyboard. In the prolugue is a reference to a that users can cut-out and laminate as a cheat-sheet.
I don't want to go too deep in detail yes for adding movies that are missing. I want to avoid the "problem" as much as possible. Just get them setup and go. The new layout of articles is a bit different.... I switched to:

1 Main Unit (adding movies)
1a prepping movies
1b viewing results
1c switching and browsing in the library
1d advanced settings & option
2 main unit (adding tv shows)
etc etc...
I don't use these topic titles, just to give you a general idea...

stampee Wrote:page 23: "Next thing is selecting the content."

NOTE: Once again, they are beginners, Don't forget to tell them how to get this menu open. "C" key,or right mouse click.
same deal as with the movies. XBMC brings you here automatically...

stampee Wrote:NOTE: In your TV section you may wish to make a meantion that TV series names must be written in a logical manner so that the scraper can find the information for each episode. I tore my hair out trying to get scrape to work on various series until I renamed their episodes into a logical manner. You could just say refer to advanced manual if you are having problem scraping Tv series.
For your own knowledge I found the following series names work well for scraping.

Babylon 5 S03E09 - Point of No Return (meaning season3 episode9 for example)
Crusade.1x01_war_Zone
McHales Navy S1E01
S01E01 - The Greatest American Hero (1)
The_Love_Boat_S1E0x1
seaquest.dsv.2x02.daggers.part.2.xvi

notice the words are seperated by . _ or spaces and the scraper does not care, it still read the names fine and scrapped the content.

There's an entire chapter now about naming files.

stampee Wrote:THANK YOU once again for the effort
-stampee

Thanks to you even more! Love it how the community is helping out and test reading it.
Will be a while before i post a new version. The next version will be 0.50 because there are too many changes that I want to implement before i want to let other users read it again. Completely re-do all the artwork, proof read myself (haven't even read it myself after typing it).

I'm almost done with basic functionality now and will start working on the advanced sections after the weekend. I hope by next weekend version 0.50 will be online, and that should be the complete works including advanced section of the STANDARD tools only. NO COVERAGE of the plugins and add-ons yet.. Those will appear in versions 0.51 and up...

Version 1.0 is hopefully done somewhere at the end of next month and will contain most skins, database tools like MySQL, EmberMM Revisited, VoxCommando, Aeon Skins and mods, uTorrent tools, and much more....
#36
ralob Wrote:Wow, it looks pretty slick. My only suggestion would be to add a glossary at the end to define terms like scraping, OSD, Calibration, etc. That way you can refer people to that section for the terms when they are first used.

Excellent idea! Can't believe that I haven't thought of that yet.... I start working on it right away so that I can add a term to the glossary while I write..
Thanks!
#37
Traffic987 Wrote:I wish I had this when I started.....

One Suggestion....Lose the watermark, It adds too much to each pages load time.

Load time? it's gonna be a printed manual Tongue

Hopefully when I feel bored again in the future i'll try porting it to a new wiki...
Maybe inofficial wiki, one that is more easy to browse cause I totally agree that I have no clue where to look for what in the wiki, and IF i find something it's out of date or incomplete Sad The wiki frustration was my main motivation for writing this thing...
#38
Very nice work indeed. XBMC really needs this type
of guide. Hopefully the team can embrace this as an official
guide. If there was some way to keep it online en editable/reviewable for more users this can be kept updated. If it could also on the fly create a printable pdf it would be sweat as candy Smile

When i get the time im gonna help you with a review and give my comments to it.

At work i write many documents i.e user manuals/maintenance guides etc so i do have experience in this field.

Couple of point:

1.
A glossery of words should be added. I bellive the correct term of such a list would be "abbrivations" This is typically a table listing up all the "difficult" name schemas used trough out your document.

2.
It should in time cover all plattforms. i.e in all areas where plattform specifics apply it's aded.

Again very nice work !
PointOfView Nvidia ION Atom 330 - TRANSCEND 2GB DDR2 DIMM 800MHz - G.SKILL 64GB SSD 2.5
Open Elec Beta4 1.95.4
XBMC Online Manual - HOW-TO post about a problem in a useful manner - Create/View Bug Report
Setup/Fix correct resolution on XBMC/Ubuntu - Usefull linux terminal commands
#39
Looks nice so far, good job! Seems like this would get the most 'bang for the buck' if it also came with the installer when you download XBMC, but thats for future discussions at the moment...
Image

Check out The Carmichael - A Skin For XBMC

Check out Night - A Skin For XBMC

Check out Unfinished - A Skin For XBMC
#40
Quote:Version 1.0 is hopefully done somewhere at the end of next month and will contain most skins, database tools like MySQL, EmberMM Revisited, VoxCommando, Aeon Skins and mods, uTorrent tools, and much more....

I strongly suggest not having anything in this guide at least about any of those things. A separate guide is fine.

Content is the most imperative - don't worry too much about presentation. I'm quite happy to LaTeX everything up once the content is written.

Cheers,
Jonathan
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


Image
#41
i wanted to thank you so much that i went to register for this account just so i could.. but in order to register i couldnt use hotmail which i have used for about 15 years...

so i made a yahoo account so i could register so i could tell you how badass your pdf guide is!!! it looks like it was published!!! your guide will last longer than the software probably..

again thanks so much...i now know how to add movies and get the metadata to show up...

now if you can write a guide for how to use media center master!!!! Big Grin
#42
fluffy Wrote:i wanted to thank you so much that i went to register for this account just so i could.. but in order to register i couldnt use hotmail which i have used for about 15 years...

so i made a yahoo account so i could register so i could tell you how badass your pdf guide is!!! it looks like it was published!!! your guide will last longer than the software probably..

again thanks so much...i now know how to add movies and get the metadata to show up...

now if you can write a guide for how to use media center master!!!! Big Grin

rofl... Thanks man, I'll wire you that 20 soon....

but... What is media center master?
Nevermind.. I google'd it... hmmm another media manager, i had never heard of it but looks good from the screen shots... I'm downloading it and let you know if I like it... Have you tried Ember Media Manager revisited?
Ember is kinda 'dead', but the guys here are busy reviving it...
#43
jmarshall Wrote:I strongly suggest not having anything in this guide at least about any of those things. A separate guide is fine.

Content is the most imperative - don't worry too much about presentation. I'm quite happy to LaTeX everything up once the content is written.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Yes leave that stuff out, i suggest that to.
PointOfView Nvidia ION Atom 330 - TRANSCEND 2GB DDR2 DIMM 800MHz - G.SKILL 64GB SSD 2.5
Open Elec Beta4 1.95.4
XBMC Online Manual - HOW-TO post about a problem in a useful manner - Create/View Bug Report
Setup/Fix correct resolution on XBMC/Ubuntu - Usefull linux terminal commands
#44
Amazing guide! Wish I had it when I was starting out as I was blind to all things XBMC and linux. If you make a continuation guide on tools and skins, etc. lmk I would love to get my hands on it as that is where I am at now.
#45
You're giving a great help to all the community! I think it's a really good guide!
Thanks a lot!
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