[Spider_mp3]

Hi Ronie,

I like the concept of additional fanart/thumbs very much; I think it is a terrific idea especially for music. So, I created an extrathumbs folder for every artist in my library, and put there some images of the artist, mainly in portrait orientation. Although I don't have any skinning skills, I managed to modify View-Fanart.xml file to have fanart view not only showing a fanart slideshow in the background, but the thumb in he left bottom corner is also cycling through all images stored in the artist's extrathumbs folder.









I have set <aspectratio> tag to "keep", because the images in the extrathumbs folder don't have necessarily the same aspect ratio, and I don't want them to be cropped or be distorted.

A suggestion would be to push the idea of extrathumbs a little further, and create a music visualization similar to "album icons", but only showing images (thumbs and fanart) of the artist currently being played. A collage of images of the artist in continuous transitions...

I have noticed that during the transition from one fanart to the next, the image of the default fanart (the one stored in xbmc's database) shines through. I think this happens because the default fanart is always shown underneath the multi-image slideshow. This is a little annoying, because you don't have a clean transition when the current fanart is fading out and the next is fading in. Is there a way to avoid this?

Best regards,
Spider

[ronie]

A suggestion would be to push the idea of extrathumbs a little further, and create a music visualization similar to "album icons", but only showing images (thumbs and fanart) of the artist currently being played. A collage of images of the artist in continuous transitions...

should doable i think, i'll put in on my todo list.
any idea of how big those thumbs should be (ie. how many thumbs in total on the screen?)

I have noticed that during the transition from one fanart to the next, the image of the default fanart (the one stored in xbmc's database) shines through. I think this happens because the default fanart is always shown underneath the multi-image slideshow. This is a little annoying, because you don't have a clean transition when the current fanart is fading out and the next is fading in. Is there a way to avoid this?

sadly not. the default fanart is indeed always shown in the background.
reason for this is the fact that the skin cannot detect if you have extrafanart images or not.
so to avoid a black background in the absence of extrafanart, the default one is always visible.

[Spider_mp3]

Well, I was thinking around 10-15 images (thumbs and fanart) laying randomly on the screen, borders overlapping a little, like a bunch of photos thrown on a table. Each "frame" in this collage would display a slideshow (multiimage) of thumbs or fanart.

So, there is no way for the skin to check if a file or a folder exists in a given path? That's a pity... Is it possible for the skin to count the number of files in a folder?

Regards,
Spider

[ronie]

So, there is no way for the skin to check if a file or a folder exists in a given path?

well, strictly speaking you can, but you can't have it fallback to the default fanart image. only 'static' fallback images are supported (ie. background-music.jpg).

Is it possible for the skin to count the number of files in a folder?

nope, not at all.

[sportidude]

Hi Spider_mp3 and Ronie,

I too would like to have my thumb in the left bottom corner also cycle through all the images stored in the artist's extrathumbs folder. Could you maybe share the mod you made to the View-Fanart.xml Spider_mp3? I appreciate it!

Thanks,
Sportidude