[TeknoJnky]

I love the fanart screen saver, its all I use and great for showing off your collection of videos.

One thing that is really annoying though, is seeing the same art repeated multiple times in a row or within a very short period of time.

Now I realize that library size has a great effect (tho I have 800+ movies and 20+ tv shows) and that random is just that, random.

However it would be much nicer if a random list was generated ONCE at the initialization of the screensaver (when it comes on), and then it follows the (randomized) list of fan art sequentially, so there are no repeats until the entire list is displayed.

This would about the same concept as loading an entire library of music, then shuffling the playlist.

Instead of playing random songs from from a static playlist, the playlist is shuffled and played sequentially.

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A second neat feature to have would be having an *option* to display the name of the movie associated with the fan art.

Even cooler would be a slight delay and fade in of movie title text.

For example, if a fan art is displayed for a total 5 seconds, 3 seconds could show just the art, then movie title fades in for the last 2 seconds.

Not all fan art indicates the exact movie, and not all members of the household are familiar with all movie fan arts.


for example, here is one way I can see the option as added to the screensaver configuration options;


- display fan art delay: 1-30 seconds (how long fan art is shown before moving to next)
- show movie title: enable/disable
-- movie title delay: 0 to 30 seconds (zero being always show title, when enabled, else delay in seconds from when fan art comes on)

suggested default values
- 10 second fan art delay
- 7 second movie title delay (ie only last 3 seconds of fan art should show title)

movie title delay should be max capped at fan art delay minus one, ie you can not movie title delay longer than the fan art delay.


Thoughts/ideas/criticism/praise?

[HardwareBoB]

I have been experiencing the same thing (lack of randomness) and what it does is shuffle the screensaver list every time it shows a new image. (so really all you want to do is change this to shuffle on init, not shuffle on new image)

What it DOESN'T do every time is reseed the random number generator, which if you did, would actually give you proper random.

I believe the better fix is to seed and shuffle on screensaver init, and then just playback the list.

Note: the fanart screensaver isn't a specific fanart screensaver, it's the picture screensaver that has been passed the fanart files. (you could achieve similar by passing the internal fanart URL to the picture screensaver) This means that addional functionality as you've described is nontrivial

[hazeh]

I love the fanart screen saver, its all I use and great for showing off your collection of videos.

One thing that is really annoying though, is seeing the same art repeated multiple times in a row or within a very short period of time.

Now I realize that library size has a great effect (tho I have 800+ movies and 20+ tv shows) and that random is just that, random.

However it would be much nicer if a random list was generated ONCE at the initialization of the screensaver (when it comes on), and then it follows the (randomized) list of fan art sequentially, so there are no repeats until the entire list is displayed.

I thought I'd simply quote this as it word for word describes my use.

I believe the better fix is to seed and shuffle on screensaver init, and then just playback the list.

From a completely naive user's point of view, this sounds like a relatively simple change - I'll cross my fingers and hope you two do the same.

[jmarshall]

XBMC's slideshow on random does exactly what the original poster suggested. You can read the code for yourself to confirm this.

What you're likely seeing is multiple fanart due to multiple copies of said fanart in your thumbnail cache. This will be remedied once video thumbs/fanart move to the texture cache (I'm about 1/2 way done with that - i.e. post eden).

Cheers,
Jonathan