[n13L5]

Just installed this, and having trouble figuring out the add-on situation...

I searched through the categories and all the add-ons I saw seem to be just content pipes...


Are there no functionality add-ons like compressor/limiter or EQ or video filters, animated GIF support and such?

Hoping I was just looking in the wrong places...

[da-anda]

our add-on API is primarily for Python add-ons atm, and these mostly either extend the functioinality of the UI or provide online content. We only have a few extension points where binary add-ons can hook into in order to do more advanced stuff. These are currently PVR add-ons, encoders, decoders. Things like an EQ and more advanced audio manipulation will be available with the next version (v17) - the required groundwork (Audio DSP) for this has been added to nightly builds 3 days ago. Animated gifs should be supported out of the box. There is currently no video processing pipeline exposed to add-ons, so no video filters besides of what's built into core

Are you looking for something in particular?

[n13L5]

Hi, thank you so much for the answer! Cool that you added Audio DSP already

My python skills are poor, I guess I should work on that


GIFs don't seem to animate. Only the first frame is displayed. I did find and follow instructions for making an 'advancedsettings.xml' file with the following content:

Code:
<advancedsettings>
<videoextensions>
<add>.gif</add>
</videoextensions>
</advancedsettings>

But they still refuse to animate...
I'd actually love to use multiple animated gifs played back instead of audio visualizers for all audio playback.



As for what I am looking for in particular:

I'd love to use it for karaoke, playing a load of animated gifs, while the lyrics get displayed in front of the animated gifs.

You might think I should just get a dedicated karaoke software, but Kodi is so much better suited to keep track of all your media and can play back pretty much anything, that it would be great if some addon would allow for flexible karaoke functionality.

[da-anda]

sorry, seems I'm wrong about animated gif support - seems I only remembered some pull request or other talk about it, but these fixes never made it in.

As for karaoke - Kodi does have a karaoke feature, but no active team dev is using it, so it's more or less unmaintained - there where some reports that it still works, but no idea how good or bad that is.

edit: the advancedsettings.xml workaround you added does work, but it won't help in your case. It works in that way, that in Video file mode you can play animated gifs like they would be a movie, but they still won't animate in the picture library. Writing your own add-on for it also won't help, because you can't have a video player and a music player running at the same time in Kodi. There is a pull requests that's adding support for an animated splash screen, which AFAIK would also add support for animated gifs in skins and the picture library, but that's not being merged yet. For the time being, you could probably use the WIP shadertoy vizualisation and write your own shader for it (if you're able to do such crazy stuff). Shadertoy based viz and screensavers are discussed and linked here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=204991

edit2: it might work if you write your own python based add-on and make it create your own UI, as I believe animated gifs should work when used as textures in GUI

[n13L5]

sorry, seems I'm wrong about animated gif support - seems I only remembered some pull request or other talk about it, but these fixes never made it in.

As for karaoke - Kodi does have a karaoke feature, but no active team dev is using it, so it's more or less unmaintained - there where some reports that it still works, but no idea how good or bad that is.

edit: the advancedsettings.xml workaround you added does work, but it won't help in your case. It works in that way, that in Video file mode you can play animated gifs like they would be a movie, but they still won't animate in the picture library. Writing your own add-on for it also won't help, because you can't have a video player and a music player running at the same time in Kodi. There is a pull requests that's adding support for an animated splash screen, which AFAIK would also add support for animated gifs in skins and the picture library, but that's not being merged yet. For the time being, you could probably use the WIP shadertoy vizualisation and write your own shader for it (if you're able to do such crazy stuff). Shadertoy based viz and screensavers are discussed and linked here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=204991

edit2: it might work if you write your own python based add-on and make it create your own UI, as I believe animated gifs should work when used as textures in GUI

Thank you much, interesting info and pointers! I'm far from being able to write shaders, I'd still have to put in serious time before I'd be able to take advantage of your other detailed info and work-around possibilities.

Probably longer than whatever amount of time it will take to merge the support you guys are working on...

What is a "pull request", btw? That term is as new to me as Kodi itself, though I had read about XBMC - I only realized after downloading that they are the same.

I guess your development efforts are complicated by the many platforms supported, if you want to keep the functionality the same everywhere.

[da-anda]

We're using the GIT version control system (hosted on Github https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc ) to manage the source code of Kodi and to keep track of what's being added code wise etc. When adding features or fixes, there are some quite simple ones that could be added directly without any review required, and more complex ones that ideally get reviewed for mistakes before they get added in order to make sure nothing breaks. In GIT terms, such a request for a review is called "pull request" (-> please review the code and if it's fine "pull" it into your codebase) and it consists of a description of the intended feature/fix/change along with the changed/added parts to the code. There other developers can then review the intended changes and comment on them before they actually get merged (= added to main Kodi source). See https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pulls for a list of currently open pull requests.

[n13L5]

We're using the GIT version control system (hosted on Github https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc ) to manage the source code of Kodi and to keep track of what's being added code wise etc. When adding features or fixes, there are some quite simple ones that could be added directly without any review required, and more complex ones that ideally get reviewed for mistakes before they get added in order to make sure nothing breaks. In GIT terms, such a request for a review is called "pull request" (-> please review the code and if it's fine "pull" it into your codebase) and it consists of a description of the intended feature/fix/change along with the changed/added parts to the code. There other developers can then review the intended changes and comment on them before they actually get merged (= added to main Kodi source). See https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pulls for a list of currently open pull requests.

Thanks a lot for the info. You guys are incredibly friendly and helpful on this forum