(2020-06-01, 16:50)bsoriano Wrote: @crazyhands911 , the images for smart playlist as backgrounds take a few seconds to appear the first time you select a menu item. After that they should be almost instantaneous. I have not found any way of making the images from smart playlists to appear faster the first time. The version of Amber for Krypton did not have the option for you to select a playlist as the background for a menu item. You could select a single image, or a folder of images as the background. You can do this in this version of Amber as well, and the image(s) will be shown instantaneously.
If you have very large playlists (let's say, over 300 items), then you should consider using video nodes (https://kodi.wiki/view/Video_nodes). Video nodes give you the advantage that you can have all of the usual submenu items for movies, for example, for your video node. So let's say you have a smart playlist for Oscar winning movies. If you want to see those movies by country, director, studio, year, etc., you would have to create more smart playlists to show you the movies grouped/ordered like that. If you create a video node, you can have Kodi create those items for you, so you could put the node as a menu item, and Recently Added, Sets, Years, Countries, Studios, Directors, etc. as submenu items for the menu item. And they would show you content only from the Oscar winning movies.
Another advantage of video nodes is that they are faster to access than smart playlists, at least in my experience.
Regards,
Bart
@
bsoriano
With regards to the backgrounds, I'm not sure if we are talking about the same thing. For the Default background image, I have it set to multi image from a folder of digital art from the main skin settings. This is not what I'm referring to.
In my above question, I'm specifically talking about being within a smart playlist with the Fanart View applied. I'm assuming this would be the same whether is was a smart playlist or the generic Movies node. With regards to speed, it is inconsistently changing the artwork that I select for the Poster or the Fanart. Sometimes it changes right away, most of the time it takes several seconds and it will be changed by the time I go into another movie or show and select new art for that one. At other times it seems like I need to back out of the library path entirely and re-enter for the poster or fanart to change, sometimes i have to do that twice even. I do have AB set to delete the old art and download the new art, but AB gives the message that it has updated the art, it just doesn't always change right away.
I will look into the node idea. I have a NAS that has folders setup for Animated Movies, Movies, Tv Shows, Cartoons, Anime, and UFC Fights. I have a smart playlist created with a "path starts with" and links to each folder. I don't know if the nodes was an option a couple of years ago when I started those or not, or perhaps they just sounded easier. I don't typically use any sub-menus for the smart playlists, except for Recently Added Movies. This does have the hiccup that it displays any recently added file that is scraped as a "Movie." So it groups Animated Movies, Movies, and UFC Fights that are recently added.
So if I messed around with nodes, I could essentially remove the generic "Movies" and essentially duplicate it to create 3 separate categories pointing at the paths instead, and the default Title, Year, Recently Added, etc. sub-menus would only apply the parent nodes (Animated Movies, Movies, and UFC Fights)? This would only show the Recently Added UFC Fights for instance? That would be kind of handy. Would changing Views also work the same? For example, I would always want to see all Animated Movies and Movies, but I would actually like to hide the Watched UFC Fights. With smart playlists, this wasn't possible, because it applied it to all "Movies," despite me only changing that on the sideblade for UFC Fights (or at least it did on my old 17.6 Titan build).
On more item I noticed last night. On movie sets, it shows the multiple item image and will tell you how many total items are in the set, but is there a way to signify that all items in the set have been watched vs not watched, or better yet, detail it out, like 3/5 watched or unwatched. Having it list how many have either been watched or remain to be watched would be nice, especially if the flag can't change based on all watched. Would it be possible to have both a set flag and a watched or unwatched flag appear on the posters, and just have the set flag in another corner of the poster than the watched flag? I leave the unwatched flag off personally and just have the watched flag appear to know what stuff I've fully watched, but noticed the set flag overrides that.
