[jurialmunkey]

The views in confluence tend to be more accommodating as a lot use keep aspect for image, but in other skins (like ftv) this is not possible due to design constraints.

Generally skins will use container content to decide what views to use. Info shown is generally done on the basis of info labels available. There will be some differences on info shown based on content type however - for instance, might show episode number and air date for episode as opposed to number of unwatched episodes for a tv show or year and director for a movie (ie generally skins try to show info that is relevant to content type).

From a skinning perspective the only thing that is generally problematic is if you can't supply posters for movie content types

[learningit]

The views in confluence tend to be more accommodating as a lot use keep aspect for image, but in other skins (like ftv) this is not possible due to design constraints.

Generally skins will use container content to decide what views to use. Info shown is generally done on the basis of info labels available. There will be some differences on info shown based on content type however - for instance, might show episode number and air date for episode as opposed to number of unwatched episodes for a tv show or year and director for a movie (ie generally skins try to show info that is relevant to content type).

From a skinning perspective the only thing that is generally problematic is if you can't supply posters for movie content types

OK. But for skins like Confluence, it appears that content type alone is not enough to get the correct fields to display. In my addons, I have less of an issue finding an image than I do getting meta-data for info fields, so I need to know that I have to set certain info fields to some value as well even if I don't have the data for them. That is what is new to me. I thought selecting "episodes" as content type for example would display empty fields relative to episodes. Confluence does not unless I set the episode info field to a value (even None is fine). If I don't, I get a "movies" view of the meta data. That is what I find a bit confusing about using setContent.

Maybe I'm just a bit dense about this and need to think about it when I'm not so distracted with other things - I have 2 companies I started and own going public this month.

[learningit]

The views in confluence tend to be more accommodating as a lot use keep aspect for image, but in other skins (like ftv) this is not possible due to design constraints.

Generally skins will use container content to decide what views to use. Info shown is generally done on the basis of info labels available. There will be some differences on info shown based on content type however - for instance, might show episode number and air date for episode as opposed to number of unwatched episodes for a tv show or year and director for a movie (ie generally skins try to show info that is relevant to content type).

From a skinning perspective the only thing that is generally problematic is if you can't supply posters for movie content types

I read this too quickly the first time around and didn't understand what you're saying about "views" - I took it to be meta-data fields, but I now understand it to mean "user selectable view layouts", kinda obvious but it was beyond me until I went to implement it. Getting this whole thing right has meant more than just setting "content type" for the type of image I have available for me. I have to get the right "content type", the right "info fields" filled in and I had to implement the ability for the user to "override" a "view type" for a given "content type" so that they're not pissed off with what they see. I apologize to you and Bromix for being so thick on this issue. Bromix's recommendations were spot on because he'd already implemented all the other stuff around it.

I'd appreciate if some skinners could take a look at either of these 2 addons for correctness - not completeness because there isn't as much metadata as would be nice to have: I have tested with Confluence, Artic Zephyr and Transparency which all look ok to me.
DIY addon : https://github.com/learningit/plugin.video.diy
I think this works on most platforms most everywhere

Syfy addon: https://github.com/learningit/plugin.video.syfy
This addon requires ssl support in ffmpeg - most kodi builds above 15.0 have it. Earlier windows version do as well. It also needs a US DNS or VPN proxy outside the US. Video is in 1080 and needs a pretty steady 5-6 Mbps internet connection.

I will implement the same framework in most of my addons in the kodi.org repo if this proves to done correctly. Thanks!

[takoi]

I know what I'm going to write here is going to piss some folks off: while I believe the above is correct, it is only half the story.
After further testing with Confluence, the behaviour that I see is that setContent really only sets the View Types available to View Options for a particular content type.
I'm not sure if that is by function or what I'm seeing is "fallback" logic because I'm using the icon and thumb fields in the listitem init rather than ListItem.Art(), a skinner or someone more familiar with the Container functions would know better than I. The behaviour may differ using ListItem.Art().
I am not using the ListItem.Art() function, but rather setting the icon or thumb or both in the init of the listitem.
What I see is that the actual view that I get is driven more by which info fields I provide in the first item of the container list.
Setting no content type gives me the following:
1) Setting the info field "Title" gives me what I would say is the "movies" content type and meta fields display.
2) Setting the info field "TVShowTitle" without setting "Episode" gives me what I would say is "tvshows" content type and meta fields display.
3) Setting the info fields "TVShowTitle" and setting the "Episode" info field gives me what I would say is "episodes" content type and meta fields display.

This is an odd old behavior that automatically 'guessed' the media type based on tvshowtitle, season and episode values. In Jarvis this is gone and you can set 'mediatype' infolabel on individual items manually.