[NeroBoron]

Awesome

[pzjuls]

Thanks for the great work in putting this screensaver together.

A couple of issues/suggestions:

I’m pointing to a picture folder with my entire digital image collection from the past 15 years. In total 77K images organized into a three level folder hierarchy. The startup time for Slideshow Screen saver is about 3-4 minutes with the spinning icon to get going while it appears to traverse the file system collecting all the filenames to work with. Once it is running everything looks gorgeous. I’m sure the performance is made a lot worse by having everything located on a NAS. Any ideas on how to speed things up? It would be great if it could start instantly in displaying at least some pictures. Maybe something like caching a list of all the filenames once (or periodically) that could then be loaded quickly on start-up each time?

Any chance this script could be adapted to work like the Artist Slideshow add-on to provide a photo slideshow while music is playing with the song/artist/cover-art being displayed on top? This would match a nice feature of Windows Media Center which I’m working to replace with XBMC.

The pan and zoom effect is a nice way to keep in more interesting. If anyone is feeling really ambitious, the Windows Media Center “Play Pictures” visual effect is really spectacular when you have a large collection of images. It has a really attractive way of displaying your collection at a higher level and then panning/zooming to specific images, including rotating a small set from picture of the same day. The use of coloring the picture in focus and using black-and-white for everything else is quite clever. There is someone who put together a Windows Screen Saver version that emulates the functionality of this WMC slideshow feature (www.photoscroll.net) that you could take a look at for an example if you don’t have WMC. If this visual effect could be implemented it would really enhance the photo capabilities of XBMC.

Hi there ronie, and NotGrounded my story is very similar I was a long time user of MCE and have now moved to Kodi and i am happy and gratefully using your Picture Slideshow Screensaver for the last 4 years thanks for all your hard work.

But today i thought i would see if any one had built a MCE screen saver for Kodi?

I then fond this http://www.photoscroll.net/

I didn’t realise just how good the old MCE screen saver was and just how much I have missed it I totally love the old MCE screen saver photo wall i have a very large picture collection now and we can all spend hours watching it and chating whilst listening to tunes is there a way or has it been already done to get http://www.photoscroll.net/ working in Kodi or a similar program or is there a way i can get Kodi to trigger http://www.photoscroll.net/ on a windows machine?

Cheers Juls

[Patchou]

Great add-on, thanks for publishing this.

Quick request: would it be possible to pre-load the next picture, one way or another, so that it's ready by the time the screensaver wants to display it? The reason for this request is that when using network shares, depending on the connection speed and the original size of the photo (especially on wifi), it can take a couple of seconds for the pic to be loaded. When animations are disabled, this causes no visual problems but when slide or crossfade animations are activated, the animation is made with a black background instead of the next picture (that's not finished loading yet) and the end result, as you can imagine, is not so good.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

[ronie]

images are currently pre-loaded 1 second before they get shown on screen.
here's a test version where the pre-load time is increased to 4 seconds:

screensaver.picture.slideshow-5.0.5.zip

please test and let me know if it fixes your issue.

[jasn]

@ronie , I am hoping you can tell me where in my music db that your SS is relying on fanart location?  I am struggling (again) with numerous black screens and cannot seem to get a handle on it.  I have set the program to display filename and see the artist name in the bottom right but no pics.  This is about a 50% failure rate.  Other fanart backgrounds in the skins I use are working fine.
[edit]
@ronie Here is a log: https://paste.kodi.tv/nujohinawe

Thx

[ronie]

the screensaver uses json-rpc to retrieve a the fanart image of each artist in your music db.
you can review the code it uses here:
https://gitlab.com/ronie/screensaver.pic...ui.py#L316

have you checked if the failed images exist on your music share?
for instance: nfs://10.0.0.189/volume1/music/Jim's iTunes/Music/MC5/fanart.jpg

[jasn]

Thx @ronie .  I have checked and confirmed files named "fanart.jpg" exist at the address many times.  I see no difference between those that display and those that don't.  I've also tried using video fanart and have the same spotty results.

Might it be that I'm using a NAS for storing my fanart images?

[jasn]

@ronie , I am posting another log where I let the screen saver run for over two hours.  It came back with ~250 fails out of what would be ~700 screen changes (10 secs per image).  At line 2034 you can even see it failed to load a Various Artists jpg from an https location.  I've tried increasing the display time to allow the query to settle in, if that matters.  I've also scoured my NAS settings and reviewed properties on the jpgs to see if an unseen permission was hiding in there.

If you could give this another look I'd appreciate it.  Thx.

https://paste.kodi.tv/uradewexep

[ronie]

nope, don't have any idea why some images fail to load.

could you please test this version and let me know if it makes a difference:
screensaver.picture.slideshow-5.0.6.zip

this version will ask kodi to load a cached version of the image (if it exists) instead of loading it directly from source.

[jasn]

@ronie, that did the trick.  I confirmed the problem was still there before the upgrade; ran the zip file and the blank screens are no longer occurring.  I've spent a 1/2-hour watching and see many artists display that previously had not.  Thank you very much for providing a fix.

FYI on a small niggle...I activate "Use Filename" in the Display Image setting.  In the past this setting always simply showed the artist name (not filename such as "fanart.jpg").  It still behaves that way but now after every artist name there is a "/" symbol, apparently listing the folder name?  Not sure if this was necessary to change your display rules?  Just an FYI...

Digging further into the Display Info settings to show filename and location (?), BTW, I was able to see the jpg addresses and saw them feeding from my (nfs) hard drive, even those that previously did not display.

Lastly, I have only recently tried activating the setting "Display Music Info During Audio Playback" and disabled any visualizations.  This is an excellent screen that will time in based on the SS setting, cycling through artist pics and display a clean, simple player info in bottom left corner.  Highly recommended for others.

Thanks again ronie!

[funkmeister7]

Kudos to you @ronie - this is a great add-on.  Am curious to know whether it is possible to code the ability of launching the screensaver from a selected image folder location.  So, for example, as you navigate through the images library and land on a particular folder (which possibly has sub-folders also), a context menu item selects that folder and launches the screensaver at that folder.

[ronie]

i'm not sure if that would be easy to add or not... but i'm mainly wondering, why would you prefer the start a screensaver instead of the slideshow?

[ronie]

FYI on a small niggle...I activate "Use Filename" in the Display Image setting.  In the past this setting always simply showed the artist name (not filename such as "fanart.jpg").  It still behaves that way but now after every artist name there is a "/" symbol, apparently listing the folder name?  Not sure if this was necessary to change your display rules?  Just an FYI...

thx! that's indeed a leftover of some testing i was doing. i'll remove it .

[funkmeister7]

i'm not sure if that would be easy to add or not... but i'm mainly wondering, why would you prefer the start a screensaver instead of the slideshow?

Thanks for coming back @ronie .  The built-in slideshow functionality has some floors... (1) the recursive logic doesn't abide by the rules to exclude file types or directories that are registered in 'advancedsettings.xml' - I'm not sure whether this is by design or a bug (but have just assumed this is the way it's supposed to work), and (2) Your add-on does whole lot more than the built-in slideshow such as options around displaying file/folder attributes, dimming, etc that just aren't available otherwise.

[NeroBoron]

sure no problem, i'll add an option to disable the animation.

Uhm did you remove it? Today the add-on auto updated and the option isn't available anymore :/