[hokemon]

I was bored last weekend, and wanted to get my hands dirty with XBMC's skinning engine just to see what it could do. Like many other fans, I wanted to store my physical DVD library in XBMC, since it's library/scraping features are so awesome.

Getting ideas from various threads around the forum, I put all my "dummy" .avi files in a single folder called "DVDARCHIVE". I then hacked and fiddled with PM3.HD to make it overlay a DVD image on top of the covers in MOST of the video views (I haven't figured them all out, and balked at the complexity of Cover Flow altogether. It shows up in the media flags footer in all views, though



At any rate, I'm quite chuffed with the results. You can get the instructions/files here:

http://drop.io/pm3_hd_offline_media_flagging

I'd like to hear people's feedback, provided they bear in mind this was a quick 30 minute hack.

(PS: Requires Camelot, but seems to work partially in Babylon, too)

[sho]

The implementation looks good, maybe I will try it when I have time.
Ideal would be to provide a good "insert DVD" video file to go with this.
Is there perhaps a way to determine if a movie is offline just by looking at the avi file, ie not look for a folder?
Then you could just drop DVDARCHIVE.avi in a folder and check "Use foldernames for lookup".

(I would also recommend to you to look at how to implement this for the "just unreleased" Confluence skin also, hint, hint nudge, nudge )

If you you have questions regarding specific view implementations, I am sure Jezz will help in any way he can, just make sure he notices the questions.

[hokemon]

Is there perhaps a way to determine if a movie is offline just by looking at the avi file, ie not look for a folder?
Then you could just drop DVDARCHIVE.avi in a folder and check "Use foldernames for lookup".

Should be easy enough to do this just by changing ListItem.path to ListItem.filenameandpath - then you have both bases covered

The issue with using these placeholder AVI's is 1) if you have "Hide Watched" enabled, your collection is going to slowly disappear and 2) you're wasting a load of disk space, though admittedly it's not such a big issue these days.

I was thinking about, but haven't looked at the practicality yet, of triggering some "insert DVD" dialog if you hit play on an offline file, instead of trying to play it. Can anyone give a quick yes/no if this is even possible with XBMC's skinning engine? If so I'll definitely take it further.

PS: The IncludesCodecFlagging.xml should be compatible with Confluence as well (great skin!!)

[sho]

This is cool, one thing I didn't realize before trying this out.
What about users that rely on "use folder names for lookup" in general (like I do)?
They are probably up sh** creek?

[hokemon]

What about users that rely on "use folder names for lookup" in general (like I do)?

I'll look into this, but I'm probably also going to follow your other suggestion and move over to Confluence

[BaerMan]

That sounds really great. Congrats to that beautiful idea!

The issue with using these placeholder AVI's is 1) if you have "Hide Watched" enabled, your collection is going to slowly disappear and 2) you're wasting a load of disk space, though admittedly it's not such a big issue these days.

I'm using three self-made video files, each one taking up as much as 30kB. They are very simple avi files made out of a single image and thrown that one into an avi-generator resulting in a 6 or 7 second video. The files are one for DVDs, one for VHSs and one for 'archived' video files.
I set up one folder for DVD and VHS movies and filled it just with symbolic links to the appropriate avi-file. Disk usage: none! Other movies are first put into their folders and after having watched them (and if I want to keep them) they get archived on an external disk and replaced by a symbolic link to the archived-avi. XBMC doesn't see any difference and the movies are all in place. This way I have all advantages of XBMC (I love playing around with the actor's list, many unknown actors have a quite impressive movie list!!) but I keep my disk clean.

Of course, this works only on systems that support symbolic links. Linux and apple will do, MS does not, as far as I know.

I was thinking about, but haven't looked at the practicality yet, of triggering some "insert DVD" dialog if you hit play on an offline file, instead of trying to play it. Can anyone give a quick yes/no if this is even possible with XBMC's skinning engine? If so I'll definitely take it further.

Maybe the above desribed movie-thing will do. As you have to go to the box/pc anyhow to insert the DVD, there is no real need to open the tray automatically, a simple hint, that the requested file is not stored locally will be enough.

[hokemon]

I'm using three self-made video files, each one taking up as much as 30kB. They are very simple avi files made out of a single image and thrown that one into an avi-generator resulting in a 6 or 7 second video. The files are one for DVDs, one for VHSs and one for 'archived' video files.

Would you care to share those files? (I've temporarily enabled uploads to the above site in case you are so inclined).

One issue I see with this method is that with the new media flagging features, your movies are going to incorrectly show the aspect/resolution etc of your dummy files, whereas using a "null" avi stays clean. Might not matter to most people, but it would irk me, so I guess the dummies would need to be at DVD quality to fix that.

Not sure about the sym links - I think Win can do it, but it's not so easy as with Linux. Something else for me to check out...

[BaerMan]

Would you care to share those files? (I've temporarily enabled uploads to the above site in case you are so inclined).

Feel free to use them. They are not cute but at least a pretty good place holder. (Oh, and I just see, they are german, sorry. Need a translation? )

One issue I see with this method is that with the new media flagging features, your movies are going to incorrectly show the aspect/resolution etc of your dummy files, whereas using a "null" avi stays clean. Might not matter to most people, but it would irk me, so I guess the dummies would need to be at DVD quality to fix that.

Resolution is DVD (720x576) but framerate is 5fps. I guess it could have been even less, but I didn't try. It also was 20-Minutes-Hack. If you want to preserve other resolutions, they should be generated seperately.