2016-04-21, 13:01
Edit: I've since added in Golden Globes and BAFTA awards as well....
Edit 2 (14 Sep 2016): There's a much easier workaround using Tags instead of hijacking the MPAA field as I describe below. See post #21. Same basic concept but a little less fiddly.
I've been thinking for a while about how I could display details about any academy awards wins (by category) as I browsed through my movie collection and I've come up with a bit of a workaround/hack. First, here's a few pics to illustrate the result:
On Titan skin
So, as I browse through my movies, details of any oscar wins for the respective movie fly in from the side. It looks pretty cool. At this stage I have just 10 categories set up but I'll add a few more as I go along.
For those interested, here's how I did it, but first several warnings.
1. There's an element to the process that's tedious and possibly very time consuming. How long? Basically it will depend on how many movies in your collection have an oscar win.
2. You can't be too attached to mpaa info i.e content ratings (at least for the oscar movies).
3. I'm no skinner and I fumbled through on a trial and error basis. Depending on your skin, YMMV and the changes could have unwanted flow on effects for other parts of the skin. I use Arctic: Zephyr and the changes are fairly seamless, although I had already modded the skin a little.
4. There's probably a dozen things that could happen to break this and/or undo your hard work.
Basically I was able to do this by hijacking the mpaa field in the library database. I don't care about mpaa info but if this info is important to you, my approach isn't going to work...well I guess it could if you hijacked another field in the database. Anyway, roughly, here are the steps I followed.
I used WIMM webserver to get access to certain fields in the database, including the Content Rating field (mpaa). Here's the tedious bit that's likely to put a lot of people off. For each oscar category, I opened up the respective movies in my library in that category and in the mpaa field I added a code I had assigned to that category. For example, I went with:
w1 = best actor
w2 = best director
w3 = best screenplay
and so on.
So at the end of the process (which took a couple of hours for me) for any given movie with an oscar win I had one or more entries in the mpaa field (depending on the number of wins). For example, for Godfather 2, I had the following entry:
Best w1 w2 w3 w6 w9
I included "best" for each movie as well as I used that as the flag on whether to display the oscar statue image for a movie (more on that later)..
The process was helped very much by the work bsoriano did in setting up various oscar playlists. See thread http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=264030
For each oscar category I ran the respective playlist and it displayed the movies in my library that won that category.
As I said it took me a couple of hours to do 10 categories. As a guide I have 40 oscar winning movies. About half of those have multiple wins which means I was accessing the same movie multiple times.
Now the code. This was the easy bit; however this is where things will be different from skin to skin. For me on Arctic: Zephyr, I wanted the oscar info to display in the header. To make room I had to shift things around a little. Here's the code I included in the "header" section of includes_furniture.xml - noting again that every skin will be different.
This is the bit that checks for "best" in the mpaa field and displays the oscar statue
<control type="image">
<visible>SubString(ListItem.mpaa, best)</visible>
<centertop>50</centertop>
<centerleft>50%</centerleft>
<left>800</left>
<width>50</width>
<height>150</height>
<aspectratio align="center">keep</aspectratio>
<texture background="true">flags/oscar.png</texture>
</control>
This is the bit that checks for each of the category codes i.e w1 or w2 or w3 etc and then reports the corresponding label i.e "Best Picture", "Best Director" etc.
<control type="label">
<visible>SubString(ListItem.mpaa, w1)</visible>
<width>200</width>
<height>20</height>
<label>Best Picture</label>
<textcolor>Dark1</textcolor>
<font>SmallBold</font>
</control>
<control type="label">
<visible>SubString(ListItem.mpaa, w2)</visible>
<width>200</width>
<height>20</height>
<label>Best Director</label>
<textcolor>Dark1</textcolor>
<font>SmallBold</font>
</control>
and so on for as many categories as you want to set up.
And that's it. As I said this workaround isn't for everyone but it may prove useful for some who want to give it a go. I'm happy with the results for not much time invested.
I'm happy to provide more detailed explanations of what I did but my noobness means I'll struggle to assist beyond that.
Cheers
Edit 2 (14 Sep 2016): There's a much easier workaround using Tags instead of hijacking the MPAA field as I describe below. See post #21. Same basic concept but a little less fiddly.
I've been thinking for a while about how I could display details about any academy awards wins (by category) as I browsed through my movie collection and I've come up with a bit of a workaround/hack. First, here's a few pics to illustrate the result:
On Titan skin
So, as I browse through my movies, details of any oscar wins for the respective movie fly in from the side. It looks pretty cool. At this stage I have just 10 categories set up but I'll add a few more as I go along.
For those interested, here's how I did it, but first several warnings.
1. There's an element to the process that's tedious and possibly very time consuming. How long? Basically it will depend on how many movies in your collection have an oscar win.
2. You can't be too attached to mpaa info i.e content ratings (at least for the oscar movies).
3. I'm no skinner and I fumbled through on a trial and error basis. Depending on your skin, YMMV and the changes could have unwanted flow on effects for other parts of the skin. I use Arctic: Zephyr and the changes are fairly seamless, although I had already modded the skin a little.
4. There's probably a dozen things that could happen to break this and/or undo your hard work.
Basically I was able to do this by hijacking the mpaa field in the library database. I don't care about mpaa info but if this info is important to you, my approach isn't going to work...well I guess it could if you hijacked another field in the database. Anyway, roughly, here are the steps I followed.
I used WIMM webserver to get access to certain fields in the database, including the Content Rating field (mpaa). Here's the tedious bit that's likely to put a lot of people off. For each oscar category, I opened up the respective movies in my library in that category and in the mpaa field I added a code I had assigned to that category. For example, I went with:
w1 = best actor
w2 = best director
w3 = best screenplay
and so on.
So at the end of the process (which took a couple of hours for me) for any given movie with an oscar win I had one or more entries in the mpaa field (depending on the number of wins). For example, for Godfather 2, I had the following entry:
Best w1 w2 w3 w6 w9
I included "best" for each movie as well as I used that as the flag on whether to display the oscar statue image for a movie (more on that later)..
The process was helped very much by the work bsoriano did in setting up various oscar playlists. See thread http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=264030
For each oscar category I ran the respective playlist and it displayed the movies in my library that won that category.
As I said it took me a couple of hours to do 10 categories. As a guide I have 40 oscar winning movies. About half of those have multiple wins which means I was accessing the same movie multiple times.
Now the code. This was the easy bit; however this is where things will be different from skin to skin. For me on Arctic: Zephyr, I wanted the oscar info to display in the header. To make room I had to shift things around a little. Here's the code I included in the "header" section of includes_furniture.xml - noting again that every skin will be different.
This is the bit that checks for "best" in the mpaa field and displays the oscar statue
<control type="image">
<visible>SubString(ListItem.mpaa, best)</visible>
<centertop>50</centertop>
<centerleft>50%</centerleft>
<left>800</left>
<width>50</width>
<height>150</height>
<aspectratio align="center">keep</aspectratio>
<texture background="true">flags/oscar.png</texture>
</control>
This is the bit that checks for each of the category codes i.e w1 or w2 or w3 etc and then reports the corresponding label i.e "Best Picture", "Best Director" etc.
<control type="label">
<visible>SubString(ListItem.mpaa, w1)</visible>
<width>200</width>
<height>20</height>
<label>Best Picture</label>
<textcolor>Dark1</textcolor>
<font>SmallBold</font>
</control>
<control type="label">
<visible>SubString(ListItem.mpaa, w2)</visible>
<width>200</width>
<height>20</height>
<label>Best Director</label>
<textcolor>Dark1</textcolor>
<font>SmallBold</font>
</control>
and so on for as many categories as you want to set up.
And that's it. As I said this workaround isn't for everyone but it may prove useful for some who want to give it a go. I'm happy with the results for not much time invested.
I'm happy to provide more detailed explanations of what I did but my noobness means I'll struggle to assist beyond that.
Cheers
