Kodi Community Forum

Hi Marcel,

Titan is a fantastic Skin, great work! But I have a few problems.

1. Artist Slideshow - Fallback folder - Images are not longer displayed on fullscreen playback (I think it's not caused by Artist Slidshow, because it works with other skins) I only use local Images. Local artist folder Images are shown. If there is no "extrafanart" folder, it shows just the "fanart.jpg". If there also is no "fanart.jpg", it shows the image from the last Artist or the global background image until there are songs played with "extrafanart" or "fanart.jpg" in the Artists folders.

2. After updating Skin Helper Service to version 1.0.144 there are no fanart background pictures shown in the movie view. I went back to version 1.0.100, restarted Kodi and it works fine again.

3. I disabled Kodi screensaver on fullscreen music playback, but the screensaver still starts after a few minutes while playing music.

Please, can you help me? If required, how can I upload the "kodi.log" file?

cu
Chris

HiMedia Q10 quad (CFW 3.0.3v2)
Android 4.4.2
KODI 16.1 (Jarvis)
Skin: Titan 3.6.78

(2017-01-10, 15:49)diedrichg Wrote: [ -> ]

(2017-01-08, 02:55)thebertster Wrote: [ -> ]Hi Marcel,

Hope you're well. I have found another problem with the skin scraping incorrect artwork ...

This is exactly why I took away all the organization responsibilities away from Kodi and gave it to Emby. Kodi did a lackluster job, the artwork customization and metadata scraping was tedious and having to rebuild the database became all too frequent!

Granted Emby is yet another piece of software running on my HTPC but it does the metadata and artwork job perfectly. And with the Kodi plugin in Emby and Emby add-on in Kodi, the synchronization is infallible.

As do I! I use Media Companion to do all the scraping "offline". All artwork is saved locally in the media folders and all data is in local .NFO files. Kodi is configured to scrape from local data only. This problem relates specifically to Titan doing ADDITIONAL scraping on its own.

(2017-01-12, 10:28)marcelveldt Wrote: [ -> ]

(2017-01-08, 02:55)thebertster Wrote: [ -> ]Hope you're well. I have found another problem with the skin scraping incorrect artwork similar to the problem I reported a month or so ago. In this case, the problem occurs on the OSD info panel when playing back a TV show episode from the library. In the bottom panel at the left, it normally displays the TV show series poster. However, if the episode's title happens to correspond to the name of a different TV show (which happens surprisingly often!), the skin is scraping the poster for that TV show and displaying that in the OSD info panel instead.

Hmmm, strange. First of all it shouldn't scrape for any art if you have that already in your library so maybe the helper "thinks" there is no artwork available.
Secondly, it should always use the tvshow's title for lookups and never the episode title...

A few questions:

1) Does the issue still exist with the latest updates from last days ?
2) Do you have the skin setting "enable lookups for addons" enabled ?
3) You are using local media files and not some (illegal) addon ?
4) Do you start the playback from the video library ?

Hi Marcel,

Apologies for the delay in replying. I only noticed the problem over Christmas, but it's possible it was happening for a while and I just didn't notice as it only seems to happen in the OSD and you also need to have an episode whose title happens to be the same as a TV show which, while more common than you might have thought, is still only a tiny fraction of episodes.

1) Yes, was still happening on both my Kodi installs (one is a generic Linux install, the other is OSMC on a Raspberry Pi) using the latest skin and scripts from your repo...however, see below!
2) The "Enable lookups for addons" option is disabled.
3) These are all local media files. As I've mentioned, I do all the metadata scraping offline using Media Companion. There is a full compliment of artwork, including the "all seasons", "specials" and default posters. Also banners, clear art, landscape, extrafanart the lot. There should be no need whatsoever for Titan/Skin Helper to scrape anything from the Internet except for the extra data like next aired which is dynamic. As I say, the correct local image is displayed initially, but then gets replaced with the incorrect one after a few seconds and you can see this in the debug log.
4) Playback is started from browsing the library TV Shows -> Show -> Season -> Episode as normal, not using any remote control app or anything.

I then built a completely fresh Kodi install on a new PC (Windows PC this time), installed only the Titan skin and its dependencies from your repo and copied just a couple of problematic shows/episodes into the local kodi/media folder and scraped (using the "Local information only" scraper). I didn't change any other Kodi or skin settings from the defaults. In this install, the OSD still shows scraped artwork from TVDB but it is showing a poster from the TV show in question rather than the incorrect "episode title" poster, but it is a different poster from the one I have stored locally. This is still undesirable as I don't want it ever to scrape images from the Internet when there is a perfectly good poster image already present locally that I have specifically chosen (I have a poster.jpg, seasonXX-poster.jpg, season-all-poster.jpg which as I say are all used as expected elsewhere in the skin).

I then went back to my two original installs and deleted the Thumbnails folder and texture cache database. One of the installs then seemed to start behaving as expected (artwork correct in OSD) while the other was still showing the "episode title" artwork. I then deleted the simplecache.db from both of these installs and they both started behaving like the fresh Windows install (showing "incorrect" artwork but at least the poster from the correct show, not the weird "episode title"-based artwork).

Going back to the Windows install and deleting simplecache.db and texture cache and restarting multiple times, I found sometimes it would show the correct local poster in the OSD and sometimes a scraped poster (but from the correct show). Further testing showed it was only simplecache.db that was relevant. Once the incorrect poster had been scraped, it was always displayed across Kodi restarts unless the simplecache.db was deleted. After deleting simplecache.db, it seems to be random as to whether the wrong poster is immediately scraped or not, but after a bit more testing, eventually the wrong poster does get scraped, and from that point on is always displayed (for all episodes of that show) until simplecache.db is deleted again. I've browsed through the contents of simplecache.db and was amazed to see how much data is being pulled in from various sources on the Internet. I can see that the "incorrect" poster is pulled from the URL listed in this key in simplecache.db, for example:

artutils.get_tvdb_details.tt1132290. {'DurationAndRuntimeExtended': u'0:45 (45 Minutes)', 'rating': 8.4, 'art': {'fanart': u'http://thetvdb.com/banners/fanart/original/84676-7.jpg', 'poster': u'http://thetvdb.com/banners/posters/84676-2.jpg'...

The same URL is also referenced in a number of other simplecache.db entries:

thetvdb.get_data.series/84676/images/query?keytype=fanart&subkey=graphical
thetvdb.get_series_fanarts.84676
thetvdb.get_data.series/84676/images/query?keytype=poster
thetvdb.get_series_posters.84676
thetvdb.get_series.84676

So it looks like something has been fixed in a recent update as I did all of the above previously and still always got the bogus "episode title" artwork, but now the remaining problem where it seems to scrape a poster unnecessarily seems to be intermittent - perhaps a timing/race condition issue?

Thanks,
Roberto

Thanks for the great skin, I'm just trying things out and the main thing I'm scratching my head about are the hubs. I can see the shortcut to hubs but how on Earth do we edit them? Probably very easy but I just can't find anything.

Cheers in advance.

(2017-01-13, 18:21)petebutty Wrote: [ -> ]Ok guys, firstly, titan skin is fantastic, it's the first skin I've been truly satisfied with all round, so well done and a massive thankyou!

Only one thing is bothering me, I've searched all through the huge amount of customizations that's available but haven't been able to get it sorted out yet, sure it's just me being daft but I've eventually given up and decided to ask for help.

So here s my issue, I've set up pvr with vu client and all is good except, when watching a channel and I go back to the tv guide, the now playing picture jumps between the small now playing box at the top of the screen and the space at the bottom right of the screen, is there a way to remove one of these boxes for the background playing, or just have it playing on the full background like some of the other skins allow you to select.

In the skin settings you will notice a few options to disable the "Now playing" infobar, that's the setting you're after. Also in that same section you can define that you want the video played in the background.
Skin Settings --> Playback & OSD is the section you need

(2017-01-13, 19:50)petebutty Wrote: [ -> ]Ok, having fiddled about for the day I've managed to get it sorted out, not really sure how I did it to be honest as I was playing about like crazy, so not sure what fixed it, only thing I can see that really helped was changing the colour theme, dunno why that did it, but hey, it's looking great now.
now for the daunting task of teaching the the rest of the house how to use it!

Sent from my SM-G930F (typie typie)

OK, great! You can ignore my previous reply ;-)
I reply to the forum posts in chonological order so I sometimes miss any follow ups in time

(2017-01-14, 19:00)chrisper Wrote: [ -> ]1. Artist Slideshow - Fallback folder - Images are not longer displayed on fullscreen playback (I think it's not caused by Artist Slidshow, because it works with other skins) I only use local Images. Local artist folder Images are shown. If there is no "extrafanart" folder, it shows just the "fanart.jpg". If there also is no "fanart.jpg", it shows the image from the last Artist or the global background image until there are songs played with "extrafanart" or "fanart.jpg" in the Artists folders.

2. After updating Skin Helper Service to version 1.0.144 there are no fanart background pictures shown in the movie view. I went back to version 1.0.100, restarted Kodi and it works fine again.

3. I disabled Kodi screensaver on fullscreen music playback, but the screensaver still starts after a few minutes while playing music.

1. This skin doesn't use Artist Slideshow but it uses my own implementation in the skin helper addon. I do not have a fallback image in place, I will add it to my todo list to add soon. For now, enable the wall background which will be diaplayed as fallback if there's no fanart found.

2. Skin Helper 1.0.144 is only compatible with the BETA version of the skin. Not backwards compatible with your current stable version of the skin.

3. This is fixed in the beta version of the skin (and skinhelper).

(2017-01-15, 16:26)thebertster Wrote: [ -> ]So it looks like something has been fixed in a recent update as I did all of the above previously and still always got the bogus "episode title" artwork, but now the remaining problem where it seems to scrape a poster unnecessarily seems to be intermittent - perhaps a timing/race condition issue?

Thanks for the very extensive report! I think I've found the issue... The skinhelper addon gets metadata from thetvdb for the nextaired info. In that same details is also some artwork supplied like the poster and fanart. It comes with the same request (and is cahced by simplecache). Normally that additional art data is just ignored and only used if artwork is missing locally.

In this use case, the background service doesn't recognize the already present metadata and tries to fullfill it with the metadata from tvdb.
So, that's why this is happening. The seconds issue is that it's using the episode title instead of the scraped one which is also incorrect.

Anyway... I found some stuff in the code which could be the root cause of this. I'm currently testing it but as I don't seem to have any of that special episodes I can't reproduce your specific issue. I will post an updated version tomorrow with my fixes. Please test again with that. No need to flush any caches or something.

BTW: Don't delete the simplecache db as that will trigger a rescrape of all additional metadata ;-)
Also note that simplecache not only stores interet metadata but also prefetched data for longrunning methods, all for speed reasons.

(2017-01-17, 00:56)chiefnerd Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the great skin, I'm just trying things out and the main thing I'm scratching my head about are the hubs. I can see the shortcut to hubs but how on Earth do we edit them? Probably very easy but I just can't find anything.

I have no idea what you mean with hubs? Please explain...

Cheers mate, only other issue I've got is the pvr guide tends to lock up quite regularly, I've gone and done a complete refresh and started setting it up from scratch again, noticed pvr artwork tends to really slow it down so I've disabled it.
Any other ideas to get it running smooth?

Sent from my SM-G930F

(2017-01-17, 01:28)petebutty Wrote: [ -> ]Cheers mate, only other issue I've got is the pvr guide tends to lock up quite regularly, I've gone and done a complete refresh and started setting it up from scratch again, noticed pvr artwork tends to really slow it down so I've disabled it.
Any other ideas to get it running smooth?

With or without pvr artwork ?

What kind of system specs ?

Sorry if that didn't make any sense, in live tv guide, there is a setting that grabs pvr artwork for the programs in the guide, which get displayed on screen, if that makes sense, it's actually a pretty neat option to have but I think it's slowing my system down so I've disabled it. Guide is still clunky though so it may be something else causing it to slow down
I'm using Nvidia shield tv with spmc

Sent from my SM-G930F

Gotta wait for the guide to repopulate again first to test it out again tho

Sent from my SM-G930F

(2017-01-17, 01:19)marcelveldt Wrote: [ -> ]

(2017-01-17, 00:56)chiefnerd Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the great skin, I'm just trying things out and the main thing I'm scratching my head about are the hubs. I can see the shortcut to hubs but how on Earth do we edit them? Probably very easy but I just can't find anything.

I have no idea what you mean with hubs? Please explain...

You can choose Movies HUB or TV HUB as menu shortcut but you can't change the content of the HUB- also the sideblade menu is broken- no menu items do anything. And the cont is mis-aligned

Hey Marcel, just working on a bit of customization.... Was curious what size icons/images need to be in order to properly fit the tiles for the vertical home menu
I am currently using your skin resource icons in the mean time and they appear to be a bit "low" in the tile and not properly centered (height wise)
Having some custom ones made and want to advise the correct size and resolution so they look great.