[ronie]

+1 Gamester. However, if, as CapnBry pointed out, there are performance issues it may not be worth it.

If i understand CapnBry correctly, his biggest concern is rendering the skin with all the 'heavy conditionals' in the xml code.
I'm currently using over 250 of those 'heavy conditionals', 200 of them are needed just to display a studio logo, the rest is for resolution/video codec/audiocodec etc..
As a test i disabled media flagging in the skin and honestly, i didn't see any decrease in cpu usage.

[watzen]

serisously. do you EVER go

'hmm, i want to watch a xvid movie, not a silly divx one!'

No, no-one does. People are just getting greedy...:p

[CapnBry]

But don't you do that yourself by differentiating between mpeg4 and h264 (which is also mpeg4, just a different part)?

I just think that the current solution is somewhat inconsistent:
For DivX/XVID you're displaying a whole family of coding standards ("mpeg4") for what is really just a part of that family (Part 2 "MPEG4 ASP"), while for another part of that family you're displaying the actual codec.

Following your argument, MPEG4 is just MPEG2 with more features, which is just MPEG1 and they're all just video so why not have an icon that says VIDEO so everyone knows the video stream uses a video codec?

The difference between them as far as I am concerned is that they use different decoders. The code acts generically, asking the demuxer "What is the name of the codec you'd use to decode this stream?" If the underlying subsystem thinks the distinction between mspeg4v2 and mpeg4 is important enough to differentiate them, that's what you get. Personally, I'd prefer less variety in the name.

[lx01]

Following your argument, MPEG4 is just MPEG2 with more features, which is just MPEG1 and they're all just video so why not have an icon that says VIDEO so everyone knows the video stream uses a video codec?

The difference between them as far as I am concerned is that they use different decoders. The code acts generically, asking the demuxer "What is the name of the codec you'd use to decode this stream?" If the underlying subsystem thinks the distinction between mspeg4v2 and mpeg4 is important enough to differentiate them, that's what you get. Personally, I'd prefer less variety in the name.

Seems i didn't make myself clear enough, sorry for that:
I have no problem if the system displays the codec used for de- instead of encoding.
My problem is that mpeg4 simply isn't a codec and thus "mpeg4asp"/"mpeg4avc" would be more correct than "mpeg4"/"h264".

[CapnBry]

Ah I see your point. I'm at the mercy of what ffmpeg names its decoders though.

Anyway since it has become clear that there are two groups of people here:
1) people who want fourcc instead of decoder
2) people who don't give a damn what decoder will be used

Since group 2 doesn't care, we'll follow group 1 and I've changed the code to pull fourcc when available and fallback to decoder codec when not. I'm done with that, but for parity I need to change what's returned by VideoPlayer.VideoCodec to do the same. That's a slightly more complicated, but as luck would have it, I have a 1pm conference call today so I should have it done by later today.

[C-Quel]

damn this guy is an asset to the community, regardless of other users wants/wishes i gotta praise you mate for your patience

thanks again from someone who loves to much info

[Gamester17]

serisously. do you EVER go 'hmm, i want to watch a xvid movie, not a silly divx one!'

You misunderstood me, I do not want to sort/filter by video codec, I just think using logos look cool in the skin

...so the DivX verses Xvid discussion is purely from a skins eye candy point of view for showcasing codec logos

From the practical stand point I only care about sorting/filtering videos by resolutions or within and without subtitles.

[spiff]

imo; useless eye candy stealing screen estate for absolutely no reason putting tons of work load on skinners for absolutely no gain. yayh for wasted work and increased complexity on all accounts!

i can *sort of* see the use for audio codec and video resolution. but any higher granularity i do not see what offers at playback time, that is the sort of thing i decided on before doing the encode / obtaining it elsewise.

[bartdesign]

+1

Screen resolution and audio is important; video codec's aren not that important IMHO, I much rather see a film studio icon on the place of the video codec
And I guess 4 icons are as much as you can include on screen before it will look like a freak show.

[CapnBry]

And I guess 4 icons are as much as you can include on screen before it will look like a freak show.

What are you talking about? This is my World of Warcraft UI and I'm always looking to add more addons to the user interface.

[ccMatrix]

+1

Screen resolution and audio is important; video codec's aren not that important IMHO, I much rather see a film studio icon on the place of the video codec
And I guess 4 icons are as much as you can include on screen before it will look like a freak show.

It is not necessary that a skin displays all information available but it is necessary to have the information in the listitem to use it.

[xexe]

It is not necessary that a skin displays all information available but it is necessary to have the information in the listitem to use it.

+1

Form verses function debates have no logical conclusion other than people getting pissed of. Leave it to the users to decide via what features or skin they choose.

[bertrand]

Thank you to those who responded. I seriously read (quickly) about 15 pages in this thread, and was really getting confused with the status.

To contribute to the topic at hand right now, it's honestly one of the features I miss the most in XBMC currently... can't explain it, but... Seeing this nice "DTS 5.1" logo, along with 1080p, reminds me why I spend so much time tweaking this HTPC

Besides the purely esthetic & egotic aspect, I'd add that as a non native english speaker, language is an important information to me & my wife (good WAF is always good for karma), and it's better if it's shown with nice little flags !

Or in a few words: Completey useless, therefore an absolute must have !

[CapnBry]

Argh. Next patch is going to have to wait till later. Works great on win32 but the Linux version did a scan and came up with the same results as a v8 system, in an outcome that has me scratching my head. I'll have to put in some debugging under linux and figure out why I'm not getting any fourcc info.

[CapnBry]

I am a dumbass, apparently you have to make install before your newly compiled binary is actually used. It works just fine under Linux, if you actually run the binary you compile.

EDIT: Patch pulled, dammit it says right on the wikipedia page that audio codecs have f*ed up fourccs. I'm making a new patch that only uses fourcc on video.