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Alanon Hello there! I see your wall of text, and I answer back.
Ah yes, all valid points indeed.
Yes, I do find Artwork Beef somewhat janky. I am slowly figuring it out. I added discart to one of my TV shows but unfortunately it refuses to let the episodes inherit it, I was expecting it to work like clearart, funny thing is, instead it adds the disc on the top level of the TV show, but it puts the clearart on top as well, so I have a spinning disc, AND clearart. Mind you, when I have enabled only discart. Somehow the skin insists on having the clearart on for TV shows, no matter what, unless you just choose to disable both. It's funny - but I digress.
In regards to all the flags, have you thought about finegraining them? Add a ticker for each, so people can just disable source, audio, channels, codec, what ever individually. I dunno.. There is a lot, no doubt. I also think for instance the time left flag could be made significantly smaller. The "unwatched" count as well. Those are really big and the string itself takes up a lot of space. So might be some room to get back there? Oh, and the source flag, I grabbed the "mkv" source and renamed it to "fallback_source.png" :p So now everything is just MKV.. Which is not far off anyway.
And yeah, I found the flags, I replaced what I could from Arctic Zephyr - it uses the same flags, but also includes the aspectratios, OG Emi does not. So that's taken care of. I really do like how they are a bit smaller, even though they do take up the same blank space as the ones you included. Oh well.
And yes, I fully understand about the views, that's a handful, no doubt. I'll make due with the medium posters view, that one looks very good too.
Uhh, the ratings flags and what not, I disabled through the settings, across the whole theme. I do not care for IMDb or other user ratings. So if I can, I disable them. It also gave me a good amount of space in the bottom flags section - which was why I bothered to do it. So they didn't overlap right into the Next Episode thing to the left.
Hrm, I see what you mean about the info panels buttons, and yes, they are ugly.
What if you aligned them from left, so that they just expand across the main panel box from there? I would imagine it wouldn't look too bad if you align them left, same pixel as where the text starts. That would give room for more buttons to tag along across the screen towards the right? Hm. I do see what you mean with the studio and artwork. Christ. That's a problem.. Yeah, you'd basically have to leave the "stock" set of text blocks in there and then have a "More..." block that would expand into a menu with everything else in it - which is of course not ideal if you like extra stuff. I don't really utilize that many things, so I didn't think about this issue at all to begin with. I am afraid I don't have any alternative logos, or anything, no. They are already rather small. I would consider inverting them, though. So it's the circles being colored by selection1 color instead of the outside square.
And oh my! "Dim home"! Yeah when I saw that I was like "Nah, I'm not gonna do that, no need!" But I see now that it solves my issue on the OSD, lol. Thank you very much. :p Oh, and I did find the compact OSD setting, it helped me very much. Again, I'd love text instead of the little icons, in the bottom of the OSD.
Extra question: Would it be possible on episode level, in the Media and Info Views, to see the season poster, instead of the top level poster? It's funny how I enter a season of a show, and it shows me the top level poster, instead of "Season 1" poster that I just saw when I entered said season. I saw in the Arctic Zephyr + MOD, the dev have done it, but I am not too good at digging through all the files, so I never found out what he replaced the poster call with. :/
Oh by the way, I have checked "use now playing as video" in the Background options, but it not using the video when I leave full screen.. *gasp* does this have something to do with the Dim homescreen feature? :p
Anyway, here's an image, of the matroska'fied "?" and what I consider to be pretty final right now. Other than all these little kinks that I'm asking you about. The poster changing to the top level is strange to me, but it seems to be the case in the majority of themes.