[NineT9mustang]

I know, 1st thing your thinking is im crazy
2nd thing your thinking is itll never get added
hopefully i can give you a positive thinking 3rd thought...so hear me out

Assigning an MP3 to a Folder.jpg so When you go into that folder, that MP3 would automatically play

I think this would be a great addition to a few places:

With TV Shows, Being able to assign perhaps the TV Show Theme.mp3 to a folder, so it would automatically play while your browsing would just make that show more personal.

Each show is so personal now:
*Wide Icons
*FanArt
*Show Current Folder's JPG
*Show Current Folder's Path/Filename (?)
*TV Show/Season/Episode Thumbs
*TV Show/Season/Episode NFO's

With Music, once you go into a Artists folder, perhaps it could randomly play that artists music

With Xbox Games it could randomly play the theme to Halo, GTA Vice City, Fuzion Frenzy

With Arcade Games, it could play old-school themes (Pac-Man, Streets of Rage, etc)

The big one would be using it in TV Shows... I'd love to hear the Smallville theme, or The Office/Chuck theme while I browse its folder

Anyway, I'm pretty positive this would never get added, and im sure itd be a pain to go through all the work for the minority of people like me who would use it... but hey maybe more people will like this idea

So heres to hoping I get positive feedback from you reading this
What do you think?

[djdafreund]

I actually kind of like that idea. Specially for TV Shows, playing the theme song when you click on one/enter the folder or something.

[peteyboy100]

One of my friends uses Plex and he showed me a super cool new feature. When going into a tv show folder, 30 seconds of the theme for that show plays. It is really awesome, you have to see/hear it to know how cool it is.

Anyhow, I was wondering if XBMC has any plans on getting a similar feature. Apparently the music is stored on plex servers.

I think this would be amazing.

[jmarshall]

I doubt it's something any of the main devs would work on, but as always, a patch would be welcome. Obviously any patch would need to be platform neutral, so the plex solution would be out of the question.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Rand Al Thor]

I just took a look at the info on the plex site and it looks pretty cool. I know they had asked scott and the guys at thetvdb to host the clips for them but szori was worried about legal issues. There was a very good suggestion made though by one of the other admins.

Check it out here:
http://thetvdb.com/forums/viewtopic.php?...music#p903
and here:
http://crowdsound.com/widgets/show_sugge...on_id=2794

I think something along those lines might actually work better for xbmc than scraping theme music. Something like the following would be great. Once a tv show has been scanned into the library you open up the context menu on any of the episodes in that show. Click "set theme music" and the show starts with a progress slider on the bottom with two dots on it. You move these two dots around until you have selected the section of audio where the theme song is. This would eliminate the need for downloading and dealing with legal issues. This same scenario would be an awesome way to set "Video Fanart" for movies ie a small clip from the movie that plays in the background instead of fanart Just a though.

[rwparris2]

Video Fanart sounds awesome.
TV Theme Music sounds horrible.

To each his own I guess.

[Jezz_X]

I'm on the side of sure its neat but a think after a few months I would get sick of music playing everytime I enter a TVshow even more so when its always the same 30 second clip. I saw plex added it but can you even turn it off ?

[peteyboy100]

I'm on the side of sure its neat but a think after a few months I would get sick of music playing everytime I enter a TVshow even more so when its always the same 30 second clip. I saw plex added it but can you even turn it off ?

yeah, I could see it getting old, but you are really only in the menu for as long as it takes to find the episode you want to watch. From what I saw, it was really cool and added an new effect that made sense to me.

It reminds me of when fanart was added. It isn't something that is needed, but adds a little something.

The video background would also be amazing.

[timdog82001]

Actually that would be pretty neat. Honestly, video fanart sounds less appealing to me, but maybe i would change my mind once I saw it in action

[rwparris2]

er, by video fanart I was thinking video thumbs... when you hover on a video a 30 sec or so clip played instead of the static image.

or maybe just a sequence of stills from the video... I can't find a non-porn example of this (and I don't want to link to pron from here) but it could look cool.

True video fanart with a video in the background that changed over each item would be really distracting...

[Rand Al Thor]

er, by video fanart I was thinking video thumbs... when you hover on a video a 30 sec or so clip played instead of the static image.

That is pretty much the way I had envisioned it when I posted above. It would be similar to what you see sometimes at the menu screen of some dvds. This clip could either be in the background where fanart would normally go or be place anywhere else the skinner deems fit.

Jezz_X mentioned that theme songs might get annoying. Sure, I think that hearing the theme song to any show a thousand times would get old. There should definitely be an option to turn it on and off. I look at it sort of like fanart. It is pretty and adds some bells and whistles when I am "showing off" my system to friends, but sometimes I just want a quick list to find a movie to watch. Some people would probably use theme music all the time, others probably never. I would probably be half and half.

[Freddo]

Personally I think I fall on the "pretty cool" side of the argument, although I definitely think it should be optional, and maybe a second option to not loop the track too.

Would the simplest way to do this just be to have an mp3 like theme.mp3 or something that XBMC scans for and plays if it finds it?....Actually make that theme.anything since users may have flacs, aacs etc.

[peteyboy100]

I'm not a developer by any means, but I know that there is code to find things like folder.jpg, so why not folder.mp3 or theme.* ?

XBMC staff is on good terms with Plex, right? Couldn't they just ask for the code or something?

Just a thought. I have no idea what is what.

[timdog82001]

I personally see no problem in this being a strictly local application, considering how easy it should be for everyone to make their own music clips, since they should all obviously have some video from which to grab the music...In other words, provide no scraper due to ify copyright issues, but users could make their own audio files quite easily and just have the local "Arrested Development-theme.mp3" files.

[Rand Al Thor]

I agree that adding a tvshow.mp3 file would be the easiest solution from a developers standpoint. The reason I suggested using a video clip and picking the theme song from there is because a) there would be one less thing in the tvshow folder. Folder.jpg, fanart.jpg, etc. Not a big deal but still. b) It would be more time consuming to create the themes for yourself. This would only be a one time inconvenience though, so again this is not a showstopper. c) This applies actually to my suggestion of picking part of a movie for video fanart as well (if not mostly). It would take up less space on a drive since you already have the media on there once. You could also retain the same quality as the original because you wouldn't be tempted to compress the file to save space. For video fanart, keeping the original quality would be an absolute necessity. We have all seen how horrible a pixelated fanart image looks. Imagine a 30 second video of that nature. Yuck

Long story short though, I am not a developer and will be happy with whatever they choose (if anything). I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth Cheers.