XBMC - Mediastream Skin

[ExtremePC]

Just to wet your appetite

Movie Library


Movie Synopsis


Cast List


Cast Photo


Library cast Cross Reference


TV Shows


TV Show - Season View


TV Show - Season - Episode View

[arkay]

Sweet eh

Should also let people know that all that content you have in that skin is automatically downloaded and generated. Even down to the point of scraping all the episode titles for TV shows. The scraping is very accurate too.

Mine are all named " Lost (s03e04).avi" etc. The tvdb scraper in XBMC goes out, grabs all the show titles, episode synopsis, cover art, thubnails etc and adds it all to the database for you. It then generates a thumbnail for each episode as vista would do but it's smart enough to save all that data somewhere other than on your share. So you can have read only shares with all the thubnails! Same for movies, music etc. You can even get at "Fan art", to use within the skins. It's sooo user friendly it's sickening

MCE with it's third party add ins just doesn't come close to what XBMC can do out of the box.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[ExtremePC]

Its not quite that easy, all my TV shows are already renamed and the first data scrape came back with nothing, I had to create an xml file with regular expressions to match my filenames.

I also like the ability to turn off main menu entries.

The scraping brings in ALL the show banners, DVD covers, movie posters, actor photos, episode stills, backgrounds (if a movie has some fanart it uses it for the background when your viewing the details). I havr an internet connection faster than 99% of people here and the scraping still took hours!

So far xbmc has been able to play every file I've thrown at it from wmv's to mkv's "out of the box", yep that means you don't need to instal or sort out ANY codecs from the ubuntu side.

[arkay]

It was that easy for me. But I don't have everything online. Took me a few goes at it to realise that if you set it scraping from the top level directory where your media is stored as:

Lost/
Lost/Season1
Lost/Season1/Lost (s01e01).avi
Lost/Season1/Lost (s01e02).avi etc etc
Lost/Season2/
Lost/Season2/Lost (s02e02).avi etc etc

It worked fine. If it doesn't know what show it is you can select "manual" and tell it.

Guess how well it works depends on how your collection is structured. Took me about an hour to get all my data done but like I said I don't have everything online. Once it's done and knows the content of each directory you can set it to auto scan on startup to catch any new additions. It's very impressive.

The other sweet thing is that it keeps track of what you've watched and what you haven't when in library mode so no more coming back after a few days and watching the first few minutes of 10 episodes trying to find the one you haven't seen!

The only media I've had trouble with are real DVD's. A couple caused a crash but the later svn versions seem to have that problem solved.

The next couple of months of bug chasing should see an end to any stability issues for the current feature set (which is comprehensive already).

It's great that it's so feature complete already given the relatively short time they've been developing for other platforms besides the original xbox and for the vast majority of things I use it for it's been very stable.

The executable comes in at 88MB! Everything included. Even the MCE remote works out of the box Add some 3rd party skins and your good to go.

I've had to tweak a couple of things. Changes the preview/skip buttons on the remote to work same as MCE including a 30 sec forward 8 sec back just etc. Everything is well documented on how to do advance configuration in advancedsettings.xml.

I've also got two user profiles set up. The first is a "Mum and Dad" profile that has all the adult content in it and is pin number protected. The second is the "Kids" that doesn't require a pin but only gives them access to their shows and movies. A feature inexcusably lacking in MCE.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[ExtremePC]

Originally Posted by arkay

It was that easy for me. But I don't have everything online. Took me a few goes at it to realise that if you set it scraping from the top level directory where your media is stored as:

Lost/
Lost/Season1
Lost/Season1/Lost (s01e01).avi
Lost/Season1/Lost (s01e02).avi etc etc
Lost/Season2/
Lost/Season2/Lost (s02e02).avi etc etc

It worked fine. If it doesn't know what show it is you can select "manual" and tell it.

Guess how well it works depends on how your collection is structured. Took me about an hour to get all my data done but like I said I don't have everything online. Once it's done and knows the content of each directory you can set it to auto scan on startup to catch any new additions. It's very impressive.

The other sweet thing is that it keeps track of what you've watched and what you haven't when in library mode so no more coming back after a few days and watching the first few minutes of 10 episodes trying to find the one you haven't seen!

The only media I've had trouble with are real DVD's. A couple caused a crash but the later svn versions seem to have that problem solved.

The next couple of months of bug chasing should see an end to any stability issues for the current feature set (which is comprehensive already).

It's great that it's so feature complete already given the relatively short time they've been developing for other platforms besides the original xbox and for the vast majority of things I use it for it's been very stable.

The whole thing comes in at 88MB! Everything included. Even the MCE remote works out of the box

Cheers,

Arkay.

My Directory structure strictly follows;

\\TV Shows\Lost\Season X\YY. Episodename

My renamer utility changes the name and puts the "recording" from "Channel BT" into the correct folder as soon as the "recording" is finished.

For XBMC all I had to add was a file called advancedsettings.xml into the userdata directory. The contents of the advancedsettings.xml is;

<advancedsettings>
<tvshowmatching>
<regexp>Season[\._ ]([0-9]+)[\\/]([0-9]+)[^\\/]*</regexp>
</tvshowmatching>
</advancedsettings>

[pistnbroke]

Have been using this skin on the Mac mini with Plex, it does look nice...

[arkay]

An update to mediastream 0.85 with many bug fixes was released today.

The following was reproduced from the XBMC forum. Hope they don't mind

The following is a list of what's changed since the original release:

• Added: Option to move the blade on the home screen further to the left (this is now the default)
• Added: Option to turn off the watched/unwatched icons on the posters/thumbs
• Added: Option to see current weather info on the home screen
• Added: Fanart button on Movie Info dialog
• Added: Option to make the clock bigger
• Added: Log Out button in On/Off menu on Home screen (if Login screen is enabled)
• Added: Scrollbars to Settings screen (if no. of options does not fit on screen)
• Added: New French translation (thanks to Modhack)
• Added: Actor thumbs to video info dialogs

• Updated: Speeded up animations in general tried to speed up the transitions to/from the Settings screen
• Updated: Made the video preview on the home screen full screen (behind the blade)
• Updated: Movie fanart now displays using a largeimage control (should make browsing movies with fanart smoother)
• Updated: Tidied up the navigation of the video info dialogs
• Updated: Now Playing indicator (in the bottom left) should not display when Now Playing UI is not available (movies views)

• Fixed: Issue where music player controls appeared in wrong position on Music Visualisation screen
• Fixed: Blurry text in list when text item scrolls as it is too wide
• Fixed: File Browser appears behind the Video OSD when broiwsing for subtitles
• Fixed: Refresh button in Movie Info dialog
• Fixed: Width of title in Video OSD when non-library video is playing
• Fixed: Songs view now appearing when in Music Playlist screen
• Fixed: Flashing of Movies background when returning to Home screen
• Fixed: Thumbs bar moving up to the centre of the screen in the Image Stream view when holding down left/right
• Fixed: Animation and button alignment on Profiles screen

If can be downloaded here.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[aanda6]

Arkay,

All you are doing now is depressing me.

I showed my wife xbmc, was she excited. Then I told her no live tv

I wish there was a solution to my dilema.

[dgaust]

I use XBMC in the bedroom, with a low powered laptop/lcd combo.

Once setup it works great for tv and movies.

I'd imagine that half the stuff that it does MS couldn't, due to legal issues, but they should really look at the skinning engine.

[arkay]

Originally Posted by dgaust

I use XBMC in the bedroom, with a low powered laptop/lcd combo.

Once setup it works great for tv and movies.

I'd imagine that half the stuff that it does MS couldn't, due to legal issues, but they should really look at the skinning engine.

Only from a codec perspective. I'm sure they could provide an interface for rich content. Even if they didn't write the code to fill it.

Cheers,

Arkay.