2017-10-22, 22:40
Quote:Interesting.. what do you use for your music then? For me, I've used Kodi more than almost anything over the last few years (since my old PC died, I migrated all my music to a low-power hdd and said goodbye to a lot of my old externals (cos I'm running off a rPi now). It sucked that the PC died, but tbh, I enjoy the peace and quiet!
Basically, foobar2k with autoplaylists and a rigorous folder structure. The thing is, once I'd set it up properly, Kodi and it's caching cr*p could just never compete. xD
Quote:I think it's a very cool idea personally. The only thing I would think essential to keep would be the clock. This skin is lovely though, I have always liked the tilted section header icons (top-left) (Music, Movies etc..) -think you'd keep those? It must be a tricky thing, to try and go minimal but not to the point where people are left at sea.
That's just the thing - if I keep them, then they'd have to take up that space on the top. In theory, I could simply keep the upper section and expand the content at the expense of the bottom stuff, but I'm not sure just how great an improvement that would be. Another way would be to move stuff around - for example, make the header a permanent fixture in the corner of the artwork, sort of like a bent corner, try and have it blend in somehow, and then combine the content list and the clock somehow, so that you could expand upwards as well.
Quote:Yes I'm not answering this bit directly but yeah the advancedsettings.xml file (used to sit in the userdata folder iirc), lets you change a tonne of extra stuff which hadn't really become togglable options yet in Kodi Settings. I used to use a cool cache setting in this xml file which let you increase the buffer, so that if you have buffering issues over your network etc. you could let it fill more cache before starting to play a video. It was very effective. These settings I used to tweak as far back as Kodi (xbmc) 11.I'm aware that there are loads of settings for the xml, but sadly I can't really force that, it's per-user only. If there's a choice of algorithms, then it's definitely worth looking up!
EDIT:
There's also section 2.4.5 imagescalingalgorithm where you can choose from about 10 different methods. But there isn't much info there about each method. Some will obviously take longer than others. I wonder which it uses by default? (bicubic is given in the example, I wonder if that's it?)
Quote:When it comes to the topic of stripping out information, I even think users could get by without the 'sort by:' and 'information' texts on the UI. Ok maybe not the 'information' part so much, as that's a fair title for what would potentially be the synopsis of a film beneath it. But really, once you've gone to the top bar (hidden menu) and chosen to arrange in whatever order, you've already made your choice, so why would you need it written again on the UI? minor thing really. just my opinion. --and it's nothing against this skin at all, it's been that way since forever in Kodi iirc. I also go ahead and remove the scrollbars as they're all extra (mostly useless things to have on screen) -again IMO. Great to have that option BTW - is this something you added yourself for this skin? because I don't remember it anywhere before..It's really only there to have some text there to display, as a point of consistency, so that you'd see it, I guess. As for the scrollbars, yeah, I added the options at the same time I added the alphabet bar. If you don't need them, why not switch them off? Made sense to me.
Quote:I might be misunderstanding you here, are you saying you wouldn't mind for example a square 1000x1000 image stretched to 16:9 (distorting it's AR)? I think that would look worse than a reduced thumb quality (but that's just my opinion), --and I may have misunderstood you anyway.No no, I'm allergic to that. I hate stretching in every shape and form, to the point of manually cropping non-standard images so that it would not be present. I was only saying that even the stretching algorithm doesn't degrade the image quality like the scaling one does. But as far as I'm concerned, I hate it. xD