[Mntz]

I think the best idea is to have some sort of standard for fanart images. At the moment the content is always positioned at the left side. (Over 900 images!)
If the skinner knows this, it's his job to implement it this way in his skin. This won't mean all skins will have the same layout. (For example use the fanart images in a ipodgui way.)
The only thing to make this work is to have the images as 'clean' as possible.
bad example
It's the skinner that has to create the transparant box and the black gradient at the rightside.

[agathorn]

Instead, I'll be handling the additional bandwidth in other ways:
1. Giving API access to the thumbnails for all artwork. We already generate thumbnails to display everything on the site, so why not make them available so client software doesn't need to download the full fan art to display when they're just having the user select which image they want.

Sounds good.

2. Finally, the creation of mirrors. I have the code mostly done, so it's just a matter of finishing it up and getting some mirrors set up. Initially the mirrors will be set up to hold only the zip files and art, to keep it simple. Instead of relying on the mirrors API that I don't think the XBMC scraper uses, I'll probably just modify my htaccess files for each section so they randomly redirect to a mirror for every file. Slightly more CPU usage, but far more effective than relying on clients to properly select a mirror. I just have to figure out if it'll actually work that way.

Please let us know when the mirroring stuff is working. Once you have it working I do plan to help you out by setting up a mirror.

3. Compression of all fan art as zipfiles. Since we're allowing access to the thumbnails so people can see the image, I can zip the full size image to reduce bandwidth. The 3 big users (XBMC, Media Portal, Meedio) can all handle pulling content from zip files, so it should help.

Why not make the images PNG or JPG files so they don't take up so much room. I mean they are background images after as you state below.

4. All fan art will be 1280x720. I understand that some people are using 1080 resolution (p vs i doesn't matter with the file resolution, btw), but IMHO 1280x720 graphics scale pretty well to 1920x1080 resolution, especially considering these are background images. We may support 1080 resolutions in the future, but only once I have a number of mirrors set up. People will hate me for this and stand outside my house with pitchforks, but that's life.

For what its worth I agree 200%. I'm sorry guys but 720p is just plain fine. The 1080p bandwagon is really a waste. Visually its such a small difference...

@agathorn:
A predefined list of colors makes no sense to me, since an image that has green in it won't necessarily look right with a green used by the skin. In fact, in most cases it would probably look worse than if the skin had remained in its default color. I'll be storing the colors as I indicated above, except I'll rearrange them so they go lightest to darkest. That should allow software to select the lightest and darkest matching colors to use. If XBMC decides to use this, that's great. But if not I think skins can just remain in their default color scheme and it'll still look nice (Aeon does this without any trouble).

Ok I can agree with you here. It was more an attempt to be able to do more than what we could without the predefined, but I have come over to your side. Its better your way. Have you decided how they will be stored? From the XBMC perspective, the best would be ARGB hex values.

@jmarshall:
As I told agathorn, I don't think implementing the colors is 100% necessary. As for displaying stuff over important areas on the background image, that may happen. I could ask the art submitter to specify if the main content is left, right, center, or none. Then the script/scraper/etc that pulls the fanart down could just pull down the images with that user's setting. This setting could probably be put in the TheTVDB scraper settings right next to the language and accountid.

I think thats a DAMNED good idea. Or perhaps (or maybe in conjunction with) have a field in the fanart data that indicates the layout then the skin can use that to put the UI elements in the right spot automatically. Not hard for a skin to do.

The other easier option is to just have people select images that will work well with their skin. If you display the fan art they can choose from, they'll just be able to select one that has the content positioned in the right spot.

My main concern: If these are pulled down with the scraper, how will people select the image they want? Right now the image selection stuff for each record is handling the banner stuff. Can XBMC allow people to select 2 images for each series, or will that fall onto a script to handle?

Let's not worry too much about that at this point. Once we start getting support for the fanart stuff in there, i'm sure the momentum will follow it through to get it polished up. When I code up the basic support for this i'm going to allow it to work with local fanart data in addition to stuff pulled from online.


So here's what i'm going to do. This week i'll start getting things coded up to allow expansion of infolabels in some of the critical areas, so that colors can be handled. After that is in place, i'll get in support for displaying the fanart images.

Like I said this will take me a few weeks to do as its in my already precious spare time, but this is something I want so i'm stepping up to get it done.

Scott I want to thank you for being supportive of this, and bearing with my rather annoying habit of talking things to death and playing devil's advocate.

In a nutshell if we can get a fanart dataset from TVDB that contains:

1. Backdrop image
   
2. Scheme colors, in hex ARGB if possible (Not sure how many colors would be good. Right now i'm mainly seeing this as choices for things like text colors)
   
3. Layout as you talked about would be nice to have as well, though not sure the best way to quantify it at this point.

[agathorn]

I think the best idea is to have some sort of standard for fanart images. At the moment the content is always positioned at the left side. (Over 900 images!)

Where are you finding these? I would like ot take a look at them.

[tvdb-scott]

Where are you finding these? I would like ot take a look at them.

http://jossan.visse.nu/~spuck/FanArtVote/

My main issue with these is that many have the gradient mask built into them instead of it being handled by the skin. Pretty much all of them will just be converted over with the "left" position set as a result, and some of them I don't want to pull over at all. They currently have 1000 images for 300 series. I could transfer the good ones over in one day.

[tvdb-scott]

I need feedback on some of my test images.
http://thetvdb.com/testfanart

The first number in the filename is the target resolution and the second is the JPG compression. I'm looking for comments on what the best compression ratio is and what I should set my max filesize for banner art to.

Also, for jm or agathorn... if I store only 1920x1080 images, will XBMC be able to handle them for 720p resolutions?

[Jezz_X]

well if you store 1080p images xbox will probably run out of memory playing certain videos anyway unless jm resizes them as he caches them locally

[C-Quel]

I need feedback on some of my test images.
http://thetvdb.com/testfanart

The first number in the filename is the target resolution and the second is the JPG compression. I'm looking for comments on what the best compression ratio is and what I should set my max filesize for banner art to.

Also, for jm or agathorn... if I store only 1920x1080 images, will XBMC be able to handle them for 720p resolutions?

in all honesty i think 60 compression is ample... ive sat and compared them especially hair on actors heads and see very little difference and lets face it we are sitting at least 2 feet away when viewing these... maybe 3-4 metres away on a htpc. just my 2 cent.

[Gamester17]

So maybe we are back at the idea of storing thumbnails (cover-art, banners, etc.) and now also fan-art in two different resolutions in XBMC which JMarshall suggested as a Google Summer of Code project:

Rewrite the thumb caching system so that it can store multiple resolution thumbs. Essentially the "CacheThumb" routine would cache the thumb, cache information about the thumb (info on date, source, aspectratio, packeda as small as feasible) and store both full size and scaled versions of the thumbs. The meta info would be stored in a separate file for fast assigning of thumbs (this could be kept in memory based on the thumb hash in a lookup table, and the ListItem.Thumb infoimage could be extended to specify what size of thumb it needs (to limit memory usage for xbox/lowmem devices).

So XBMC would download the image with the highest resolution then internally store that image at two resolutions (one that is the original and one that is a down-scaled version).

[jmarshall]

No. Stick with 720p IMO, then it's way less effort on everyones behalf. We only have to cache the one image, it's smaller (JPG) and that's less bandwidth for Scott.

I also don't like the idea of different "focus points" as this restricts the skinner. Most designers I know want to have a single "Video Information" layout that works best for their skin. They don't want to have to bother about different layouts.

IMO a background image (i.e. no text, no gradients, just a bloody poster image ) similar to the Aeon images will work best. The skinner can then layout their stuff over the top of it in whichever way they please. It works for all, and is nice to look at.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Jezz_X]

I'm with jmarshall ^

[timdog82001]

i definitely agree about no gradients. I personally vote that no images with gradients be included on the site

[NineT9mustang]

I'm with JM on this too!

No text, No fading, 720p, etc

If needed, a skinner could add everything (Fade, text, etc) and make it exactly like the screenshots have shown in this thread...

[agathorn]

I imagine everyone is in agreement as far as the image goes, so that shouldn't be an issue. Plain old image and let the skin do the work.

In fact I think someone said the only reason so many of them have built in gradients is because Media Portal used to have that limitation and people just kept making them that way.

[tvdb-scott]

My decisions, so I don't have to keep responding in multiple locations.
http://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?p=2777

[timdog82001]

great news, and sounds great to me. on a side note to developers, assuming support gets added for this to xbmc eventually, would it be possible to add the functionality to allow skinners to do a multiimage referencing the images for their tv shows? Many skins have multiimages display depending on what button you have highlighted in the home menu. This would allow the skinner to reference the end user's actual tv shows so it would only show images for shows the user actually has and watches. I think it could be neat anyway..