Kodi Community Forum

Now kodi 19 uses music multi discs and boxsets any chance of a disc view. See this example. I achieved this by using discart as a thumb but would be nice to have the view use discart instead of thumb1, thumb2 etc

(2021-02-21, 01:35)Karellen Wrote: [ -> ]

(2021-02-21, 01:11)popy Wrote: [ -> ]Please, bigger font.

My understanding is that it is not that easy. A font size increase means resizing all the text boxes throughout the skin, which then bumps into other elements like posters, flags other text boxes. It is a cascading change.

Maybe try another skin. I know Aeon Nox:Silvo has large fonts (a bit too large in my opinion) so it might be what you are after.

i have found a workaround for this have posted it in this feature requests about a year back

xml:


    <control type="group">

                            <control type="textbox">

                        <top>-70</top>

                        <width>90%</width>

                        <height>283</height>

                        <align>center</align>

                        <aligny>center</aligny>

                        <font>font52_title</font>

                        <label>$INFO[ListItem.Label]</label>

                        <titlecolor>dialog_tint</titlecolor>

                    <textcolor>white</textcolor>

                    <shadowcolor>dialog_tint</shadowcolor>

                

                        <visible>String.IsEmpty(ListItem.Art(banner)</visible>

                    </control>

in home.xml under <include>OpenClose_Right</include>

(2021-02-21, 01:11)popy Wrote: [ -> ]Please, bigger font.
With every version it gets harder to read (or I am older 🤔).
A kodi option to change font size would be great.

Thx

is this of any use
http://www.freespace.com.au/filehosting/541238

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=365957

Artist name customisation per this thread: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=365182

Could you please add a new view to the Genre (category) page? It could roughly look like the sketch below:

This would be very useful. It could also be a view of the Movies page, not (just) of the Genre category.
The current views that are available on the Genre page are not nicely usable - it's bad, outdated user experience.

With the current view you basically have to decide beforehand which genre you'd like to watch and then see a very large page full of movie-options for that specific genre. In many cases the better user experience would be to also show items per genre and all genres (in a configured or watch-history/watchmarked-based order).

There's countless things one could change here or make configurable, such as how many rows are shown per Genre, which genres and categories are shown and in which order and which items are shown per genre at the top/left (they could simply have the same order as the order configured on the movies page). However, I suggest just implementing a fairly simple view roughly like the one above and adding configurability and additional similar views only afterwards over time.

I think this is very important or probably even critical for making Kodi a competitive, up-to-date, useful media center.

-----

Furthermore, until there's dedicated pages for short films and documentaries (shown in the left panel just like "Movies" and "Series"), making them "Genres" here could be a good workaround until then. This would be useful if the "Movies" page could be made (by default) to not show Documentaries and Short films - for example by filtering the genres or by having separate excluded media sources for them. This way, one could browse everything one could watch in the Kodi media center.

At a later point one could also add online media sources for Short films and Documentaries. One could also easily switch between favored views with shortcuts (like what's currently the "Wall" view of "Movies" and this "Sliders" view of the "Genre" page). The arrow to the right could show the next set of items and also expand a second row when used so that more items can be displayed per slide. One could switch to a category/genre page by quickly tapping the arrow to the right twice. There could be small notification-balloons displayed for a few seconds in a corner that show the shortcut-keys every time that page is opened until the user uses them.

This would be a pretty cool feature and I like the idea. Just be aware, that this is not as easy as you might think. 

If you set the skin into debug mode, you will see that this section uses the same xml file as you would enter "movies" -> "titles"....it's MyVideoNav.xml

The content which is shown on those sections is then created by Kodi core code by calling the videodatabase. From the home-menu, if you hit the "Genres" button, we are calling: videodb://movies/genres/

For titles: videodb://movies/titles/

and so on.

You could probably show the content of specific genres if you are calling a specific genre like: videodb://movies/genres/1/ where the "1" is the specific "genre-id" in your database. Unfortunately those IDs aren't consistent over multiple Kodi instances. It's the same as for actor-IDs in your database. If you open the MyVideos119.db file with a SQL viewer you will see the genre IDs.

Make a screenshot, delete your DB and rescrape it and you will see that the genre-IDs will differ from before. 

So for your request, we have to write a new view, probably change a little bit of core code and further more, add a bunch of settings to be able to let the user choose which kind of genres are shown there. So we have to make settings for each existing genre. Currently (and I've only added one of my sources) I have 32 different genres listed. Some are in german, some are in english. So it will be 32 additional settings (one setting for each genre ID to be able to let the user decide which one to show first and which one last). We would need the Genre-IDs to get the videos which are related to them. 

To expand your sketch above just imagine for each row a call like: videodb://movies/genres/1/ to show the videos for the specific genre. So you will need a setting for each to be able to configure the genre-ID and then make sure, every genre is listed

Generally the "Genre" Category is meant to list every genre which is on the database and not the movies which are related to them. 

TBH, as much as i like the idea, I highly guess this won't ever happen. Estuary is meant to be a very basic skin with very basic functionality. Feel free to use something else. There are way more flexible skins out there which probably will provide such a functionality. But implementing this is a real BUNCH of work which has to be done and, furthe rmore, needs to be maintained. 

So I guess we have to say "sorry".

i tried to tell him it could be done with widgets but he dose not wish to edit the code

xml:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

<smartplaylist type="movies">

    <name></name>

    <match>one</match>

    <rule field="genre" operator="is">Biography</rule>

    <order direction="ascending">title</order>

</smartplaylist>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

<smartplaylist type="movies">

    <name></name>

    <match>one</match>

    <rule field="genre" operator="is">Documentary</rule>

    <order direction="ascending">title</order>

</smartplaylist>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

<smartplaylist type="movies">

    <name></name>

    <match>one</match>

    <rule field="genre" operator="is">Action</rule>

    <order direction="ascending">title</order>

</smartplaylist>

Thanks for all these insights DaVu! Maybe some/somebody decide to go for it anyway even if it's not easy (I wasn't suggesting that it is). I think it could be very useful to many and improve Kodi a lot.

It's probably not so much a feature request for Estuary than a general Kodi feature request (but available with the default skin).

I just hoped that such feature requests were easily findable and in separate issues like on GitHub (where one can also subscribe to them). Here it'll probably just drown instead of facilitating or making it more likely that motivated people interested in this develop it.

The usefulness of that view wouldn't be as large if one had (or could easily add) a main menu entry for Documentaries and could exclude Documentaries (and short films) from the Movies view (which they would clutter especially if one has many documentaries) - that's a separate proposal linked above.

Currently, one has to basically to decide beforehand which genre to watch and then go to the view showing all entries of it, rather than just browsing your organized library and deciding what to watch during doing so (like in film distributor stores, popular streaming sites, checking TV scheduling or zapping TV channels). I never watch movies this way, except for sometimes when I feel like watching a documentary (or short film) instead of anything else. I'm sure it's the same for many others, including because it makes much sense and because all other similar ways and alternatives (named earlier) allow for this and many people are used to this (and probably looking for such a feature and consider it "basic" functionality).

An advanced versions of this, like showing two rows when pressing the right arrow once, could basically be a moonshot-type effort but still be worth it. More basic versions aren't that far from what's already implemented: the Movies frontpage (just hovering over Movies and not pressing enter) already shows these rows for "recently added", "recently viewed" and so on. Just not genres. So this would basically only require the left panel to autocollapse after a while for a fullscreen view of the frontpage (a separate task) and adding these genres-rows, which in the most basic form wouldn't require your described 32 settings but could simply show the genres in order of which have the most marked as watched.

(2022-01-09, 14:29)mYnDstrEAm Wrote: [ -> ]I just hoped that such feature requests were easily findable and in separate issues like on GitHub

Issues on Github is for "issues" not for "feature requests"
 

(2022-01-09, 14:29)mYnDstrEAm Wrote: [ -> ]The usefulness of that view wouldn't be as large if one had (or could easily add) a main menu entry for Documentaries and could exclude Documentaries (and short films) from the Movies view (which they would clutter especially if one has many documentaries) - that's a separate proposal linked above.

Adding main menu entries is also not supported by this skin. And I highly guess support for it won't make its way into Estuary for the reasons I mentioned above. Use other skins. Estuary Mod v2 for example still looks similar to default Estuary but provides such functionality. 
 

(2022-01-09, 14:29)mYnDstrEAm Wrote: [ -> ]"recently added", "recently viewed"

Both of them are smart playlists which are available via widgets/categories. Those are not "Views". Using smart playlists and widgets already have been mentioned to you. See the posting from @the_other_guy which would be easiest for you.

• I know, I would find it better if there was a tag for "feature request", you could still ignore all feature request tagged issues there, but at least it would be proper issues then (with all the associated benefits)
  • Relevant to this, it looks like I did have a bug issue while trying some proposed solutions (just because I'm interested in this, not because they would be solutions): 
    first Kodi didn't quit anymore and always had to be killed with the process manager, now it quits again while still showing the same console output as before
    but always starts in windowed mode instead of fullscreen. Didn't find anything relevant in the logs so far. Ordinary, non-tech savvy people who don't wish to dedicate a lot of time to this will never put up with this or could manage such problems (and even I don't really have the time for this despite that I think that this problem is of tremendous importance to open source, GNU/Linux and Kodi as well as significant to the Earth environment)
    
    
• I consider this basic functionality not just because it's very useful and makes a lot of sense, but also because this is the or a main way to browse popular alternatives (like in film distributor stores, popular streaming sites, checking TV scheduling or zapping TV channels)
  • btw it would be far better and more relevant here if one could easily switch skins within the GUI, but most people will never find a need for that or will do so even if they happen to know that a specific skin supports this feature, that there are other skins and how/where to switch skins in the GUI
    Edit: and why would you switch skins just for one missing feature...not only do I not know how security for skin code is ensured (e.g. hashsums matching the open source repo), Estuary is sufficient and great otherwise; many users are probably also fine with it as it is in terms of general UI/design
    
    
• This is not about me or any particular problem I'm having or a use-case that's niche but about (substantially) improving Kodi and about the general public (in a realistic practical way). I think this is what many people here misunderstood.
  

(2022-01-10, 13:13)mYnDstrEAm Wrote: [ -> ]btw it would be far better and more relevant here if one could easily switch skins within the GUI, but most people will never find a need for that or will do so even if they happen to know that a specific skin supports this feature, that there are other skins and how/where to switch skins in the GUI

Last answer in that regard from my side...

Navigate to: Settings -> Interface -> Skin and hit "Enter" on the line which mentions the "Estuary" skin. 

On the upcoming dialog you are able to switch already installed skins or install new ones by selecting the Get more button. After you selected "Get more" you will see a list of available skins in our repo

So switching skins is easily done via our GUI.

Maybe I got you wrong. If not, you should make yourself probably a bit more familiar with Kodi

Hey there,

as kodi recognizes spines for music albums, can we have a "spine view" for albums, please?

It would be great to see albums the way we once stored our physical cds

As described in more detail (but in the wrong place) here.

It would be great if it was easier to tell the difference between tv-show episodes and movies in the "Guide" view.

At the moment only the program genre changes the background colour, causing movies and tv shows belonging to the same ETSI genre to have identical colors. To be more specific, a lot of tv-shows have a genre like "Comedy" or "Detective / Thriller" that both belong to the major ETSI genre "Movie/Drama". These are used for both movies and tv-shows which is valid according to the ETSI specification.

In "Includes_PVR.xml" there is an expression defined named "listitem_has_episode_info" which checks if a list item has an episode-number, episode-title or season-number. I tried to use this expression as a condition to apply a colordiffuse attribute to the relevant texture. I was hoping that a semi-transparent white layer would highlight programs without episode info, but it looks like I can only make such items darker. I'm just touching the subject and certainly no UX/UI expert, so hopefully the skin designers have a better idea to tackle this issue properly and not just for me, but for every Estuary user.

(2021-07-31, 23:33)DantePL Wrote: [ -> ]

(2021-07-31, 12:26)black_eagle Wrote: [ -> ]There is a pending pr (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/19983) that adds the ability for Kodi to detect the type of HDR in a file (HDR/DolbyVision/HLG) and display the correct flag in Estuary.  It can't be merged currently though as it changes the JSONRPC and thus no further backport fixes for it for v19 will be possible.  Once v19.2 is released, it should be able to be merged into v20.

Thank you very much for your reply. This is fantastic news!
I will be waiting (im)patiently until then

Sooo, I stumbled upon v20 Nexus Alpha 3 Kodi build quite by accident and started diging into changelogs since Alpha 1 and was mezmerized by this entry from Alpha 1: "New media flags for HDR videos: detect, store and process the type of HDR in a video file". I installed Alpha 3 without further ado and YYYEEESSS! - the HDR flags now whow up in Estuary. Fantastic! Thank you! Customizable subtitles are also cool! Great job

Is it possible to keep a preferred default view for my Music library? My preferred view is always Albums sorted by Artist, but refreshing the browser makes it return to sort by Title.