2012-03-13, 20:28
Hey all -
I use XBMC primarily for music videos, short films and other short content. Unfortunately, that hasn't been easiest, as it seems its primary focus is television content and films.
I'm hoping those of us who use it for short content can talk about what we've worked out - skins, scrapers, thumbs, nfo, aspect ratios, you name it.
For my skin, I'm using Ellipsis - which is the only skin I could find that had a link to music videos on the front page (I've since learned it might be possible to make a link on any skin that allows custom home page links). It's attractive and fast.
I'm manually creating nfo files, usually with simple information and no links. I'm also manually creating thumbnails and fanart. I notice that XBMC uses the fanart for the artist of the music video, not for the file itself (if I have 4 Kanye videos, the fanart will be the same for all, the first -fanart.jpg file found).
For short films, I created a custom movieset "Short Films" that I put them all into, so that they are easy to navigate too in the Movies section.
Currently, my biggest issues are:
1) fanart - it would be great to force XBMC to ignore artists and just pull the fanart the file is linked too)
2) aspect ratio - I have not figured out how/where to indicate what aspect ratio a file is, without doing it through the menus (which is a global setting). For long-form content, this would be fine, as I would only have to change the setting once every half and hour. For music videos, which are usually 4 minutes long and of vastly different aspect ratios, I would like a way to encode, preferably in NFO files, how XBMC displays the content.
I use XBMC primarily for music videos, short films and other short content. Unfortunately, that hasn't been easiest, as it seems its primary focus is television content and films.
I'm hoping those of us who use it for short content can talk about what we've worked out - skins, scrapers, thumbs, nfo, aspect ratios, you name it.
For my skin, I'm using Ellipsis - which is the only skin I could find that had a link to music videos on the front page (I've since learned it might be possible to make a link on any skin that allows custom home page links). It's attractive and fast.
I'm manually creating nfo files, usually with simple information and no links. I'm also manually creating thumbnails and fanart. I notice that XBMC uses the fanart for the artist of the music video, not for the file itself (if I have 4 Kanye videos, the fanart will be the same for all, the first -fanart.jpg file found).
For short films, I created a custom movieset "Short Films" that I put them all into, so that they are easy to navigate too in the Movies section.
Currently, my biggest issues are:
1) fanart - it would be great to force XBMC to ignore artists and just pull the fanart the file is linked too)
2) aspect ratio - I have not figured out how/where to indicate what aspect ratio a file is, without doing it through the menus (which is a global setting). For long-form content, this would be fine, as I would only have to change the setting once every half and hour. For music videos, which are usually 4 minutes long and of vastly different aspect ratios, I would like a way to encode, preferably in NFO files, how XBMC displays the content.