Kodi Community Forum

Latest PseudoTV Channel Pack and Image Pack are now available at http://tiny.cc/xbmcplaylists. All the details are in the readme.txt.

Channel Listing:

Channel 1 - Current TV (Episodes aired in last two weeks)
Channel 2 - 2KTV
Channel 3 - 90s TV
Channel 4 - 80s TV
Channel 5 - 70s TV
Channel 6 - 60s TV
Channel 7 - Action and Adventure TV
Channel 8 - Animation Nation
Channel 9 - Kid TV
Channel 10 - Comedy Network
Channel 11 - Documentary TV
Channel 12 - Drama TV
Channel 13 - Fantasy TV
Channel 14 - Mini-Series TV
Channel 15 - Oldies TV (Mix of 50s, 60s, and 70s)
Channel 16 - Reality TV
Channel 17 - Sci-Fi TV
Channel 18 - Special Interest TV
Channel 19 - Sport TV
Channel 20 - Western TV
Channel 21 - Current Movies
Channel 22 - Action Movies
Channel 23 - Adventure Movies
Channel 24 - Animation Movies
Channel 25 - Biography Movies
Channel 26 - Comedy Movies
Channel 27 - Crime Movies
Channel 28 - Documentary Movies
Channel 29 - Drama Movies
Channel 30 - Family Movies
Channel 31 - Fantasy Movies
Channel 32 - History Movies
Channel 33 - Horror Movies
Channel 34 - Music Movies
Channel 35 - Musical Movies
Channel 36 - Mystery Movies
Channel 37 - Classic Movies (Movies released prior to 1976)
Channel 38 - Romance Movies
Channel 39 - Sci-Fi Movies
Channel 40 - Short Movies
Channel 41 - Sports Movies
Channel 42 - Thriller Movies
Channel 43 - War Movies
Channel 44 - Western Movies

Jason, every now and then when I switch to a show, there is a delay while the drive spins up. I have shows spread out over a few hard drives do to my library size. This causes PseudoTV to abort saying it can't load the channel. Is there anyway to extend the time PseudoTV waits for a show to start or if it aborts, go back to the EPG and not completely exit? It's hard to reproduce for a log file since the drive needs to be powered down (idle) and then a show started which resides on that drive. I know it is the delay in the drive spinning up cause I can hear it turn on and spin up. When I go back into PseudoTV the same show loads fine after that since the drive is spun up.

I love the channel updates! Keep in mind that the next version (aimed for next week some time) will support mixed playlists...movies and TV shows supported by a single channel.

Yea, I've experienced this hard drive spinup issue as well. I'll increase the timeout for the videos to start for the next release.

Thanks Jason.

Wondering what people's thoughts are around the mixed playlists. My channel packs are aimed at genre so that they work with anybody's video content. Should there be a separate set of "mixed" channels? My goal is that these work out of the box and meet most peoples general needs. Obviously, if you want to create specialized channels that have your wife's favorite shows, then those have to be setup manually.

As the number of channels increases, the load time increases so trying to balance the two. I personally like separate TV and Movie channels, but others may prefer mixed. Maybe I should create two separate Channel Packs one with Mixed Channels only and one like above with the channels separated.

Thoughts? If you have suggestions for additional channels, please let me know. For example, I was thinking about having a separate pack where the playcount=0 rule is added for those who don't want to see previously watched shows. This is a personal preference thing so I can see where some people prefer this and others don't. If there is no interest, then I won't spend the time to create a separate set of playlists for it.

Same thing for the number of items. Currently the 50 tv items and 25 movie items is working well for me and provides a good balance between load time and channel mix. If others prefer 100 tv items and 50 movie items, let me know.

I like the idea of the mixed channels assuming there's a smart way to go about them. For example some channels on tv will show a couple movies in the afternoon on weekdays then tv shows most of the rest of the time, while other stations will show movies most of the day and tv shows in prime time. Then on weekends these same channels tend to show more movies than tv shows depending on the amount of series content they have for those days. If it can be done in a realistic manner with only a few "stations" showing movies at a time and the rest showing television series much the way actual stations do it could be very interesting. I'm not sure how complex it would be to go about emulating such scheduling but I figured it was worth mentioning. ^_^

Jason, what should the format of the mixed playlist be? I've tried the following, but the latest pre-release is failing on it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="mixed">
<name>mixed playlist</name>
<match>one</match>
<rule field="playlist" operator="is">Playlist_1.xsp</rule>
<rule field="playlist" operator="is">Playlist_2.xsp</rule>
<limit>50</limit>
<order direction="ascending">random</order>
</smartplaylist>

I am not sure how to make this work. I haven't been able to get mixed playlists to work period in XBMC, i.e. they never show any episodes and/or shows and fail to load in the video playlists.

*nevermind. it seems to be working now*

In the most recent test version that I got a couple days ago, everything was AWESOME, except---

-Still I'm having this problem of certain shows dominating a channel for like 5 hours. Is this an issue with the script or is it something to do with the way I am constructing my playlists?

-It seems that once something has started playing, the tv schedule won't leave it behind--it resumes from the previous location. Know what I mean? So if I go to drama, and Mad Men plays for 5 minutes, then I turn it off and come back 2 hours later, it is still in the same spot, rather than skipping to another show.

Is this just me?

This was the test, not the master version

JTucker1972,

Did you try to maybe leave off the extension .xsp of the playlist names that you included on your main playlist? I think that I remember that you can't include the extension.

Mark

branlr Wrote:In the most recent test version that I got a couple days ago, everything was AWESOME, except---

-Still I'm having this problem of certain shows dominating a channel for like 5 hours. Is this an issue with the script or is it something to do with the way I am constructing my playlists?

Is this just me?

This was the test, not the master version

I think this is do to how your playlist is constructed. If you have a show with 100 episodes and a show with 10 episodes, then the law of averages would pick 10 episodes of the first show for every 1 episode of the second show. You need to create a playlist for each show and limit it to the same number of episodes. This evens the odds that one show will be picked as another.

I use genres for my Channel Packs. I have a large collection so my shows rarely repeat. If you have limited shows than this can skew one show over others.

I would be curious to know what your rules are for the playlist.

mwkurt Wrote:JTucker1972,

Did you try to maybe leave off the extension .xsp of the playlist names that you included on your main playlist? I think that I remember that you can't include the extension.

Mark

Jason's script requires the extension. I'm not sure why it wasn't working, but I reloaded the script and it added the channel successfully this time. Now I need to tinker more with the actual mix of playlists.

jtucker1972 Wrote:Thanks Jason.

Wondering what people's thoughts are around the mixed playlists. My channel packs are aimed at genre so that they work with anybody's video content. Should there be a separate set of "mixed" channels? My goal is that these work out of the box and meet most peoples general needs. Obviously, if you want to create specialized channels that have your wife's favorite shows, then those have to be setup manually.

It would be awesome to mimic the rhythmic nature of movies that keep us interested.

Start off with some comedy, then a drama or dramatic movie, then some more comedy, then a drama.

Kind of an up and down, emotional wave sort of thing.

No idea if that can be done generally, but if so, would be very cool!

Since I parse the mixed playlists manually, it's much easier for me if the included playlists are just the names of the files.

@branlr: the script will not keep track of the time that it isn't open. If you close the script and start it again 10 minutes later, it should pick up exactly where it left off(sorta), not 10 minutes into the future. The reason I do this is so if a person has a channel of a show they haven't seen and it's playing in aired order, they won't jump ahead to an episode they don't want to see yet.

@jtucker1972: I understand the concern about adding mixed channels in, and the issue of the script taking too long to start up. Sranshaft and I have made great strides in allowing skinners to do what they want with this, which was my primary goal. After the next release (which should happen very soon), my goal will be to optimize this start time and make the channels more flexible. TheOddLinguist has been doing some work on giving a user more flexibility in creating channels, so those things will be the focus. Ideally, the number of channels a person has won't impact the start time of the script.

New release! Thanks to Sranshaft for the awesome new skin (not to mention coding and testing), Bridgman for the nice new icon, and zepfan for his constant testing of broken code.

Jason102 Wrote:my goal will be to optimize this start time and make the channels more flexible. TheOddLinguist has been doing some work on giving a user more flexibility in creating channels, so those things will be the focus. Ideally, the number of channels a person has won't impact the start time of the script.

Will this eliminate the need for what I am doing? I don't want to waste my time creating these playlists if they will be obsoleted soon with a different method of setting up channels.

No, I will still use smart playlists as channels. What I'd like to do is...load the channel data in the background, or load it on demand...get the duration information in bulk...something to speed up the process. My goal is to make you're work even more useful than it already is :-)