xexe Wrote:All that really says is "the current way is lacking". This we know.
So user 1 can use the new scheme and user 2 has to rely on XBMC manual choices via the GUI. Not especially flexible when you get to a family of 4 or a dorm of 10.
Agreed but this fundamentally breaks one key design goal of "3) Is placeable ANYWHERE in the filesystem" and as such is not appropriate.
Trying to dealw ith this might be too much for this project but if a solution can be derived that is logical and easy to implement you have one more reason why the devs might implement it.
I agree with all of the above.
But, no OS in the world manages this today. Let alone a media center.
There's only a couple of ways to go with profiles:
a) Either ALL user data (the entire DB and artwork) has to be duplicated for every profile
b) Some aspects of the data are shared.
Consider windows for example. "Folder.jpg" in a given folder will be picked up by ALL profiles. You can't have a different folder.jpg per profile in a given folder. So it's a shared artwork. This is how XMBC is working too, but with the added ability to override that art with your own.
I did have a think about this and thought of the following
<user>.<moviename>.fanart.........
Where user is a profile name, OR "default" which means all profiles use it unless overridden, eg
david.starwars.fanart
susan.starwars.fanart
default.starwars.fanartid
or could be done like this
david\
--- starwars.fanart
susan\
--- starwars.fanart
default\
--- starwars.fanart
So user David has his own art
user Susan has her own art
user Andrew doesn't have any art so gets 'default'
This would work and could even incorporate user groups, but this is way off scope for this thread I feel. And probably overkill for all XBMC. At the moment, it's hard enough to get small improvements made (in some areas).
I did say originally that this schema neither improves upon profiles or makes it any worse. But with my comment on how the user COULD store their art in one flat folder (or in profile subdirs), then this would be a solution... (but imposes a rule on the user to store their art in a specific way.
For the future I think... when profiles get THIS powerful, you have to impose restrictions, every OS does!. You just cant write profile specific data into shared folders without issues.