Kodi Community Forum

I think the information you get when browsing movies is weirdly prioritized in XBMC, at least in the skins I've tried. Traditionally, at least for Hollywood movies, one might describe a movie like "Johnny Depp is a pirate" or " It's the new Tarantino movie". That is : Main actors and/or Director and maybe a sentence to describe the plot.

Now its more like: " Well, let's see, the runtime is 124 minutes and it's got an IMDB rating of 5.6. Yeah that sounds like a movie I'd like to see". Let me just read a 2 page plot description and then maybe as a last check I can see who's in it.

Is this something a different skin can change?

Another thing: Most of the time when I leave a movie to check something on the internet, its to go to IMDB and see what other movies an actor has been in. It would be great if I could pull down a fresh IMDB listing for an actor from within XBMC. As it is now, you can see what other movies you have in your library with the same actor, but that is not as useful, I think.

Or is that info not avaiable for scraping?

Give concrete examples of this "weird priority" behaviour.

My point was only that information about the main actors is essential information IMO.
You shouldn't have to hunt that info down, it should be shown when browsing the movies.

This is an example screenshot (the skin: Transparency). You get a lot of what I think less useful info, but not the principle actors names.

Take that up with the skinner. Note that cast information is not available (but director info is) in the list - only in the video info dialog.

Often imdb lists cast alphabetically.. what is XBMC supposed to do in that case?

I checked a couple of new movies on IMDB and they have the stars on top of the cast list. Its true that some movies have more idealistic listings where "Prison guard No 2" is just as important as the star but most of those are movies that haven't got any stars anyway.

As I understand the scraping process, it means getting the webpage and parsing the html code, so it should be possible to get the first 3 names on the cast list. And those who put in the info on sites like IMDB would probably adopt if things like XBMC start to display the info in a certain way.

Is there a skin that does what I want, or does it have to be changed on some deeper level?

I mean, the different skins in XBMC already changes so much about the look and feel. Why shouldn't I be able to choose what info is displayed about the movies when I browse them. If I don't want say IMDB rating and runtime displayed and want the actors names instead, that should be a skin setting. XBMC already grabbed the webpage containing all the info, it should be a user setting what is displayed. But I'm not sure if that is posssible for the skin designer to implement.

whatson Wrote:I mean, the different skins in XBMC already changes so much about the look and feel. Why shouldn't I be able to choose what info is displayed about the movies when I browse them.

most likely because everyone prefers to see different things in a skin and there's no way to include them all as an option.

you, for instance, would like to see the 'top 3' actors of a movie, but then someone else comes along and wants to show 5 actors.
and then another user will make a request for an option to either display none, 10, or all of the actors.

and if this is not enough, someone else wants to show the actors only in fanart view, but not in list view....and most likely he wants it the other way around for tv shows.


i hope you see where this is heading...