Hello everyone,
I am pleased to introduce
Amber 3.2.0, now with skinshortcuts integration.
It is already in the Amber repo, as well as the GitHub for the skin. I will be submitting soon to the Kodi repo as well.
What has changed?
- Menu and submenu items are fully customizable. You can add an unlimited number of menu items and submenu items, name them whatever you want, and reorder them however you want
- If you want the skin to start in a specific menu item, make sure it is the third item on your menu, for horizontal menu, and the fourth item, for vertical menu
- Up to 6 shelves per menu item, very customizable as well.
- The menu and shelves are customized in a new option in Amber Settings, Home Layout: Customize Menu and Shelves
It looks like this:
- Backgrounds for each menu item are fully customizable, I have added the options to have random movie fanart, tv show fanart, music fanart, conditional weather and playlist fanart as backgrounds
- You can choose not to show the fanart for the shelves items, and also to hide the shelves when not focused (press up to show the shelves). This is shown here:
- As you can see from the above picture, you can also choose to show two shelves together. This replaces the previous Jarvis shelves functionality, with the added benefit that you can choose what two shelves will get shown. This will only show the first two shelves configured. It looks something like this once configured:
(I apologize for images that look outside borders and such, this is due to having Kodi windowed instead of full screen. They look fine full screen).
- You can also choose to have double row shelves. This can be configured on a shelf by shelf basis, so you can mix double row shelves with single row shelves for the same menu item. A double-row shelf will look like this:
- There is a new System Info shelf
- You can change the sort order, sort direction and item limit for each shelf. Not all sort order options are valid for each shelf type (there are a lot of possible combinations!), so keep that in mind if you don't see the shelf sorted by the field you chose.
- The skin supports a variety of Default Shelves, which are all library based or playlist based, including some with static content (Next Aired episodes based only on tv.show.next.aired, daily and hourly weather, favourites, favourite addons and system info). These shelves should be extremely fast, independent of your library size.
- The skin supports also a variety of Additional Shelves, provided by ExtendedInfo, Library Data Provider and Skin Helper Widgets. Your mileage may vary in terms of performance with these.
- Just like before, you can choose up to 10 addons to be shown in the Favourite Addons shelf
- This post would be too long if I listed all of the available shelves, please explore for yourself!
- On a new skin install, or if you choose to reset all skin settings, Amber will configure default menu/submenu/shelves to match current Amber for Leia configuration.
Other Changes
- The info dialog for videos has been reworked. It now includes studio logo (if you decide to use an image resource addon for this), certification flag (more on that below) as well as ratings from IMDb, IMDbTop 250, RottenTomatoes, TheMovieDB, TVDB and your own rating. It looks like this:
- The ratings are not done with addons, so there is no performance hit to the skin. You have to have the ratings information in your Kodi database, put there by a scraper (like Universal Movie Scraper, which supports multiple rating types) or loaded from an NFO file (if using local information only as the information provider for your video sources). I do not plan on adding skin helper service ratings if you do not have the ratings in your database. If you don't have any ratings, none will be shown. Only color ratings are provided, I have no plans on adding monochrome versions of the rating flags.
- The certification flags are supported for a few countries: USA, UK, Brazil, France, Netherlands, Australia and Germany. Except for the USA, in order for the flags to show up for a particular country, it must be in you database with the country prefix and a : before the certification. For example, UK:12A, or Brazil:10. You should not have any other prefix, like Rated or something like that.
- If you would like me to support another country, please provide me with where I can download color, transparent background png images for all the rating flags for your country, and I will include in the skin.
- Only color certification flags are supported. I do not plan to add monochrome versions of the flags.
- You will notice a button with three dots (...) underneath the plot in the image above, this is a "More" button that you can press to get a text viewer dialog to pop up with the full plot. When clicked, it would show something like this:
- The image above is from a set info dialog, which is a new custom dialog in Amber. In order to see the additional set information, you need to have the addon script.skin.info.service installed, and you need to restart Kodi after installing it. You can get this addon from the Amber repo. The set info dialog looks like this:
- In this custom dialog, the Browse button will take you to the list of movies in the set, and the Show Fanart button will show the set fanart fullscreen.
- You can get movie information for each of the movies in the set by pressing I on any of them. If you click any of them, nothing will happen.
- I have re-worked the Big List view to look similar to what it did in the Jarvis version of the skin. It now looks like this:
- This view is fanart/thumb based. I have no plans of showing any other artwork type in this view.
- I have also implemented a Tall List view, with the option (in Amber Settings, General) to show more items in the list, which reduces the font size and item height. It looks like this:
- This view can show up to 18 items at a time.
- The skin now supports a backup/restore functionality, which allows you to backup all of your skin configuration, including menu/submenu/shelves. For this to work you need the addon script.skin.helper.skinbackup. This can be found in the Kodi repo.
- The Reset All Skin Settings option now also wipes out your menu/submenu/shelves configuration. Be sure to back up before using this option.
- There are probably multiple other changes that are escaping my mind right now
What isn't there/limitations?
- You cannot change the type of art or aspect ratio shown for the shelves. I have kept the same style for each shelf as the current Amber version. I do not plan on adding this, or providing options for different shelf positions.
- You have to have the first shelf for a menu item, or else no shelf is shown for that menu item. If, for example, you add three shelves for a menu item, and then set the first shelf to None, the shelf will not show. I cannot change this.
Known Issues
- If you only have one shelf configured, and you press Up while on any item of that shelf, there can be a slight flicker. In my opinion this is a very minor item. I am still investigating a solution.
Special Dependencies (Optional)
- script.skin.info.service to get movie set information. This addon can be found in the Amber repo.
- My modded version of script.skin.helper.widgets (version 1.0.66). This would be needed if you use the skin helper widgets Recently Added Episodes shelf, which groups multiple episodes added for the same season (you configure that in the addon settings). In my modded version, the addon returns back to Kodi the tv show id and the season number for the grouped addons, so that you can click on the Season poster on the widget and go directly to that tv show season. With the regular version of the addon, if you click on the poster, it just starts playing the last episode added for that season.
- My modded version of this addon can be found in the Amber repo also.
Thank you
- @
Mr. V for patiently teaching me about skin shortcuts and for coding the widget navigation for me. @
BobCratchett, creator of skinshortcuts, for his kind advice. All of the users that patiently tested and retested the version while it was still Amber32, in particular @
treboR2Robert and @
edjalmo for always being willing to test some more and for pushing me in a good way to provide better solutions.
As always, please post here all of your questions/issues/requests. I hope that this new version is useful to you.
Regards,
Bart