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XBMC, transparency! - several issues/comments - Printable Version

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XBMC, transparency! - several issues/comments - fredphoesh - 2010-09-18

Hi Ronie and guys,

I have been a user of JRiver Media Center for some months now, worth the $50 I paid for it, but there is one major thing about XBMC which is drawing me to it... the XBMC Android app is FAN-F****ing-TASTIC.

There are a few issues, but being able to navigate and control my entire music connection VISUALLY and WITHOUT a TV is fantastic.

BOXEE, JRiver and XBMC seem to have their own strengths and weaknesses, here are some comments after a many hours on Transparency!, many of which are probably XBMC comments rather than Transparency ones, but I dont know which they are. I hope you will find my comments useful Wink


1/ Im surprised there is no fan art for some very common bands like The Smiths, Steely Dan, The Ramones etc... why is so much missing as about 50% of my music has no fan art... seems very odd as 99% would show something in Google Images (which would be a good scraper, no?). Similarly there is no Info/Reviews for many classic and very well known albums... also odd.

2/ JRiver does a (very nice) slide show of fan art in the BG, i see that is in the Transparency! options, but it does not seem to work.

3/ If you are showing fan art in the background, interface shows what was last selected rather than what is currently being played. If you are navigating files this feature is cool to see what you are currently selecting, but as soon as you escape or go back or away from that page, the fan art of the Now Playing must resume and replace the art of the last selected track.

4/ It is confusing as to which mode you are in... it should be very easy to toggle between modes and especially easy to get to the Now Playing window. The Music main menu item should definitely have a Now Playing shortcut. Full Screen mode should be included as one of the views one can toggle. At present it seems to be only available by pressing M then right arrow 6x.

5/ IMO one should not have to go to a special mode to have access to things like info and lyrics. At present you have to press 8 or 9 keyboard strokes to get to show lyrics. In general, the keyboard commands could be far more powerfully implemented. Sometimes I seem to have to press ESC several times to get from now playing back to home. The Home key should do that (for example)

6/ The process to select folders and scan movies is very unintuitive, took me hours of fiddling then time on the forums trying to work it out... the wiki does not explain it properly (or at least, I had no success following the wiki instructions)

7/ I have three computers at home, all with XBMC loaded... Importing the entire library over the network is very slow, so I tried Exporting the music library then importing to other computers, which seemed to be working, but there were no artists/albums/tracks at all after the import?

8/ Settings seem to be a bit jumbled, especially wrt skin, appearance, general, and also the use of movies vs videos is unclear and inconsistent.

9/ when you select Music>Album from the main menu, it should ALWAYS show you your Albums. Sometimes it shows you the list of tracks in the album you are currently playing.

10/ pressing I for info when playing music in "full screen mode" causes the OSD to move off the screen leaving the wallpaper. If you are in the FANART view, pressing I results, as you would want, in seeing the info, review etc... IMO that is very confusing and unnecessary, I should always show info, M always show the transport controls.

11/ Artist bio text has no scroll bar or up/down arrow in the Fan Art view... so you cannot read all of it.

Thanks for all your work guys,

Cheers
Mark. Smile


- ronie - 2010-09-19

1. it's a community effort to make as much fanart available as possible.
you can upload missing images to http://www.htbackdrops.com/, that's where xbmc downloads them.

2. fanart slideshow is available on the fullscreen music visualization window.
it requires you to manually store the fanart images in a 'extrafanart' folder in every artist folder.
on the homescreen, you can use the xbmc fanart cache to create a slideshow, using the 'multi image' background option.

3. switch to the 'now playing' window or the fullscreen visualisation window. those will always display the fanart and media info of the currently playing track.

4. 'now playing' can be accessed from the context menu (right-click mouse / press 'c' on keyboard). as for the rest, it should be implemented at xbmc level, not by the skin.

5. it's handled by xbmc, not the skin. you can however modify your key mappings for easier access to certain items.

6. wiki is a community effort, please improve it as you see fit.

7. maybe the path is stored in the exported file?
the path to the files will surely be different on the other computers.

8. i can only alter the 'skin settings' section, the rest is done by xbmc.
if there's anything specific you'd like to change in skin settings, i'm open to suggestions. :-)

9. good point, but i doubt it can be changed. xbmc remembers the position you where at and will return to there when re-entering.

10. not exactly...in full screen mode, I is a toggle between 'always show info' and 'hide info after x amount of seconds'.

11. check the autoscroll option in Settings > Skin Settings > General > Enable auto scrolling for plot & review.


- fredphoesh - 2010-09-19

ronie Wrote:it's handled by xbmc

Hi there Ronie, thanks for the detailed response and for clarifying some things.

I think, as you say, many of my issues are XBMC issues, and I think I should post a lot of the things on my list there rather than on the Transparency! sub-forum...

Im sure we will speak again some time, thanks again,

Mark


- fredphoesh - 2010-09-19

ronie Wrote:it's handled by xbmc

Hi there Ronie, thanks for the detailed response and for clarifying some things.

I think, as you say, many of my issues are XBMC issues, and I think I should post a lot of the things on my list there rather than on the Transparency! sub-forum...

Im sure we will speak again some time, thanks again,

Mark