[nonJon]

Mining other skins for ideas... I found this media view from ronie's Transparency! skin.



Impractical or too cool to ignore? I haven't decided yet.

[mediumdry]

Personally, I'm not a fan. And with the current trend for the scraper to get movie posters without any text on them, it can be very difficult to figure out what's what. I prefer what's already there, but feel free to add, of course!

[EctoOne]

Hey, I just rediscovered this awesome skin. Last time I used it was on Isengard I believe shortly before Jarvis was released, so I had to switch and forgot about it because there was no Jarvis version available at that time. And I found it because I was taking a look at the Retroplayer builds of Leia and immediately loved it again and got the Krypton version for my active system.

But there are some small things I want to mention/request:

• The Leia version has an option in the shelf customizer to switch between thumbnails and posters for TV shows, I wish that was more of an global setting, because I also want that for the Movies shelf.
  
• In general I wish that some of the views would use posters instead of thumbs. Not all my Movies have thumbs and it feels a little bit weird when they fall back to posters.
  
• I wish there was an setting to display random movies in the shelf instead of recently added. I know I could edit the smart playlist that is used to display them, but I think an option would be good.
  
• Enable some of the album views also for artists. I added the Panel (icons) view but then in the top left corner it shows the Artist name twice back to back (instead of Artist - Album, like it is on the Album view), and I have no idea if/how I could copy the view, remove the second Artist entry and make it only available while viewing Albums.
  
• Would it be possible to set the images used on the Music shelf and icons view (maybe there are more views, can't tell right now) to use square images? They are currently rectangular and the images are stretched/cut off. And I don't know if my covers are all wrong but they are all square and so are the folder.jpgs I use as artist images. I tried to change it, but I wasn't able to find the correct location of the code.  I was able to set the aspect ratio to keep but then the frame was obviously to big.
  
• With the Retroplayer feature closing in, we could need an Games Menu entry on the main menu (Mostly because I haven't figured out how mark the new menu as favorite so I have to switch skins currently if I want to test some games ).
  
• Is there a way to have the current videoplaylist/musicplaylist as favorite so that I can have it appear in the submenu? I know it is available in the context menus but that's no quick enough for me to get to.
  

Anyways, thanks for keeping this skin alive! Hopefully you can add some of the requests or I have to find out how to make them myself. 

[nonJon]

Welcome back to quartz. I'm on vacation for a couple weeks so a thorough exam will have to wait but I like some of your ideas for sure.

Cheers!

[djwayne1985]

hi all can someone please help me i would like to move the menu bar to the bottom of the screen please i have tried editing the home.xml but to no avail any help would be much appreciated

[EctoOne]

Welcome back to quartz. I'm on vacation for a couple weeks so a thorough exam will have to wait but I like some of your ideas for sure.

Cheers!

 Awesome, and of course I'm not asking to do it right away. I currently don't use Leia anyways on a daily basis, so just take your time. Unless you're going to to backport some of the changes to Krypton. Just kidding, enjoy your vacation.

I actually forgot one suggestion.

• On the TV show panel have posters/thumbs for the entire show instead of episodes. Maybe with the option to only show unwatched shows. I tried adding that myself, but since last night was the first time I even looked at the code of a skin, I had some issues.
  

[arielf]

How can you customize, edit the main menu, start?

[nonJon]

How can you customize, edit the main menu, start?

What did you have in mind?

[nonJon]

I actually forgot one suggestion.

• On the TV show panel have posters/thumbs for the entire show instead of episodes. Maybe with the option to only show unwatched shows. I tried adding that myself, but since last night was the first time I even looked at the code of a skin, I had some issues.
  

Already discussed in posts 76 thru 79. I know of no other skin doing this. Do you?

[EctoOne]

I'm not sure about the used method but I made it on the igCong (Krypton) skin using a smart playlist with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="tvshows">
    <name>unwatched tv shows</name>
    <match>all</match>
    <rule field="playcount" operator="is">
        <value>0</value>
    </rule>
    <limit>14</limit>
    <order direction="ascending">random</order>
</smartplaylist>

I pasted that in the episodes.xsp from Quartz but it wasn't showing any images in the panel. When I clicked the show on the panel nothing happend and of course the label was wrong.

[nonJon]

Interesting. I'll look into it.

[nonJon]

hi all can someone please help me i would like to move the menu bar to the bottom of the screen please i have tried editing the home.xml but to no avail any help would be much appreciated

Menu bar positioning occurs at lines 61, 79 and 94 in Home.xml. Slider and sub-menu placement at 165 and 183, respectively. Moving the media shelf requires touching: 110. 201. 305. 387, 432, 535, 641 and 698 in Includes_Shelf.xml.

Likely some other alterations depending on what you want to achieve.

Be prepared to lose whatever changes you make in future skin updates.

[nonJon]

The Leia version has an option in the shelf customizer to switch between thumbnails and posters for TV shows, I wish that was more of an global setting, because I also want that for the Movies shelf.

Not liking this idea, The reason for adding a thumbs option to the tv show shelf was a no-brainer... to alleviate the monotony of having a shelf full of the same poster. Movie shelf does not have this problem and thumbs take up more space and do a poor job of identifying what's what.

In general I wish that some of the views would use posters instead of thumbs. Not all my Movies have thumbs and it feels a little bit weird when they fall back to posters.

I don't get this comment. Only one of the ten movie media views uses foreground fanart/thumbs.

I wish there was an setting to display random movies in the shelf instead of recently added. I know I could edit the smart playlist that is used to display them, but I think an option would be good.

This feature will be implemented in v5.4.2.

Enable some of the album views also for artists. I added the Panel (icons) view but then in the top left corner it shows the Artist name twice back to back (instead of Artist - Album, like it is on the Album view), and I have no idea if/how I could copy the view, remove the second Artist entry and make it only available while viewing Albums.

I may consider more view options for music at some point but this is rock-bottom on my priority list b/c there are so many more appealing ways to consume music these days.

Would it be possible to set the images used on the Music shelf and icons view (maybe there are more views, can't tell right now) to use square images? They are currently rectangular and the images are stretched/cut off. And I don't know if my covers are all wrong but they are all square and so are the folder.jpgs I use as artist images. I tried to change it, but I wasn't able to find the correct location of the code.  I was able to set the aspect ratio to keep but then the frame was obviously to big.

You lost me here too. All images related to music are square. What am i missing?

With the Retroplayer feature closing in, we could need an Games Menu entry on the main menu (Mostly because I haven't figured out how mark the new menu as favorite so I have to switch skins currently if I want to test some games ).

Game support will likely happen once the code is merged with mainline kodi.

Is there a way to have the current videoplaylist/musicplaylist as favorite so that I can have it appear in the submenu? I know it is available in the context menus but that's no quick enough for me to get to.

Easy enough. Edit/add the following to your favourites.xml:

PHP Code:

<favourite name="Music playlist">ActivateWindow(musicplaylist,root,return)</favourite>
<favourite name="Video playlist">ActivateWindow(videoplaylist,root,return)</favourite> 


[skb1]

Been a long time user of Quartz & have done some pvr work back in the day ,so was excited to see it's being carried on ,so back to kodi g for me hehe! Things I started cleaning up so far

[nonJon]

Welcome! I hope you have a strategy for preserving those changes when the next update hits. Would hate to see you lose all that work!