View Full Version : Wide icon/tumbnail support (banner size)
hello all,
it would be nice if xbmc could support wide icons, there are lot of people allready using them and large ammount has been made, please take a look at : xbox-scene forum (http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=514875).
i have made myself changes in code tweaking thumnailcontrol class (something like big icon support), but i can't submit to cvs anyway.
thanks in advance.
you can upload the files you changed as a patch to source forge (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=87054&atid=581840).
cheers b4tm4n.
there will be apparently support for tv shows post 2.0 - its widely understood the current way xbmc handles video files is not at all suited to tv shows, maybe they could experiment and look to implement a gui like this sometime, post 2.0
yeah, nothing will happen pre 2.0, but i'd expect this to be a post 2.0 inclusion.
hello all,
it would be nice if xbmc could support wide icons, there are lot of people allready using them and large ammount has been made, please take a look at : xbox-scene forum (http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=514875).
i have made myself changes in code tweaking thumnailcontrol class (something like big icon support), but i can't submit to cvs anyway.
thanks in advance.
i`m confused the original post was about wide icons and the second post third post is talking about tv shows support ??
that should be these. both :)
i had a look at the thread on xbox-scene and these actually look way cooler than i imagined, maybe you should post some screens here miko i'm sure if devs saw how cool it looks they might be more excited to add some kind of "wide icons" view for video ( maybe as some kind of xml only advancedsettings option )
spif is right tv show support and wide icons is almost same. changes i have made are visible in all parts of xbmc (still waiting for activation mail on sourceforge). but if there is some developer interested for this i am willing to send directly to his mail address. on link i gave in first post there is explanation how to change small icons into wide icons, my feature just make it new type. but i think it will be nice to make wide icons show only on directory list view, and when you select tv show or season, files should be shown in list.
NineT9mustang
2006-06-09, 00:46
freddo, here are some screenshots of the wide icons (the links work, if they dont show, try just opening them up in a different window, i think pics.apartment808.com dont like some websites :():
http://pics.apartment808.com/users/ninet9mustang/sample2.jpg
and so i dont take up this whole thread with pictures, here are just links to them :
tv shows :
http://pics.apartment808.com/users/ninet9mustang/sample3.jpg
http://pics.apartment808.com/users/ninet9mustang/sample1.jpg
http://pics.apartment808.com/users/ninet9mustang/byrequest.jpg
http://pics.apartment808.com/users/ninet9mustang/spiff.jpg
emulators :
http://pics.apartment808.com/users/ninet9mustang/emulatorwide.jpg
xbox games :
http://www.users.muohio.edu/sanderjg/xbmc/wide/007eon.png
(there are more in the works)
dvd movies :
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v228/sxeezekiel/silenthill.png
(there are more in the works)
micko, i agree with you on this... although i love how easy it is to apply these wide icons, its not perfect.
to sum it up, i think all we need, is a new view option. perhaps, list/small icon/big icon/wide icon... by doing this, there will be a default resolution for the icons, and future skins can work with that
for example, in mc360, the wide icons dont work properly because mc360's right fileview is way too small, so the icons get cut off (solution is in the works, just decreasing the icon width)... but if there was a standard width of the view wide icons, this would be ideal and the only thing a person would need to do is increase xbmc's cache.
another thing i have been thinking to make these wide icons even easier to implement, is to have skins have their own template to go over the icons, so lets say u have a banner of a dvd movie, and u set it as your folder.jpg, when u look at this banner in pm3, pm3 can have scanlines go across, and mc360 can have its white border around it, etc... so ppl can easily create their own icons by just making the banner, and not useing the templates provided
but anyway, its good to know that the devs are interesting in wide icons, are changing how we view tv shows :)
-ninet9
this view should be selectable on everything (music, movies, programs etc..)
i think we could be fine with the current size of the icons (460wx82h) and also set the cache to 460 as a standard.
this leaves the user to only have to make the selection of views, not being a "pro" editing .xml's, since most people get their xboxes premodded and have no clue, nor knowledge to do such tasks.
then in the skin when defining the size of wide, the skinner sets the right size and let xbmc scale down/up the image.
also if we imlement that wide icons will be named folder.tbw then we could have a folder.tbn for regular views and the .tbw for wide .. so we could choose ;)
have a few more suggestions on this subject, will post them here once i typed them up.
i definately agree about having separate files for wide/normal thumbs. keep it compatible with any dvds of movies etc people have already made.
user should be able to select wide/normal preference, with a fallback if some percentage don't have the appropriate thumb.
NineT9mustang
2006-06-13, 06:00
there is much improvement to be made with tv shows/wide icons, since xbmc wants to improve tv show viewing, i feel wide icons is their perfect solution...
i've been kind of holding off creating more wide icons in case things change a lot with how the devs approach the tv show/wide icon solution, so im just going to wait til 2.0 is out and see what they do.
then i'll start going crazy again with these wide icons :d new website design, better request layout, etc, etc...so until 2.0 is out and a solution is made, ill wait patiently :) thanks a lot devs! with all this excitement with how the devs are approaching this, ill be making a donation, cause im happy right now :)
-ninet9
casperse
2006-10-31, 14:55
I love the wide Icon look, but I hate that there is no way to se a listing when you have a season wide icon folder and 24 episodes all shown in the wide view.
Also the idea about having two icons *.tbn and *.tbw is brilliant!
So I really would love if this was a new feature and not a "hack/mod" to XBMC.
Should the cash be increased when running these wide icons?, because I have my xbox as default and it works fine (v2.0)
Any timeline to when this might be implemented?
Any link to officiel "future" development forum?
Cheers
Casperse:nerd:
I'd like to have another view mode for banners. For examples, take a look at my tv site's Lost page (scroll down):
http://tvdb.zsori.com/?tab=series&id=73739
Standard sizes are 758x140. This size is based off the original tv.com banners.
I don't know if 5 rows of banners would work, or if another number would work best. If there's any way for each user to customize this, that would be even better. If there's a way to do this already, I apologize... I'm an idiot. :)
well since you can in fact already do this, I guess you are an idiot? There's a gigantic thread about this topic on Xbox-Scene here:
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=514875
Thank you, and my apologies. :)
Sorry to post, but I figured I would give it one last effort before I took the long road. Here the deal. All my movies are on my computers hard drive and I stream them to my xbox. they are each in individual folders and when I add the wide icons and change the name to folder.jpg, they show up but are a little small and fuzzy. I know my xml setting are right because if I replace the imdb thumbnail file with mine, but keep the file name EX. mymovie.jpg turns into e145eod6.tbn it works fine and looks great. I thought the problem might have something to do with the images being on my computer as opposed to my xbox but even when I ftp the folder.jpg image to my xbox and choose thumbnail from my c:\ it still shows up fuzzy. It's a real pain to download each thumbnail and then replace it. Anybody know whats going on???????
HarshReality
2006-12-11, 05:47
You have to alter the skin as well as the thumb and typically you can have a movie (John.avi and simply make John.tbn for the thumbnail) in the same directory.
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=514875
Thanks for the reply but I knew that already, tested it again and it works for getting the icon in place but still looks really bad. When I get a wide icon they are typically around 50kb in size when I put them into the folder as a tbn or jpg file. Then it shrinks. I was looking into the Q:/UserData/Thumbnails/Video folder and I notice that the icon is now less than 10kb. So it is taking my 50KB tbn file and making a ?cache? of it in the Thumbnail folder and using the small one. So this is my problem. If I let IMDB download the thumbnail first then i copy over it with the wide icon but keep the original file name it stays at the exact same size it was on my computer and looks great but takes forever.
jmarshall
2006-12-11, 06:32
You need to alter your thumb caching size. See advancedsettings.xml in the online manual.
Aparently Advanced Settings.xml is not the same as AdvancedSettings.xml and that makes a huge difference. One little space causing me hours of frustration and it should have been the first thing I checked. Don't know how I missed it. Thanks for your help Gents
Today I testdrived the new skin from smokehead called "Clearity". Its using only square format icons. So when having the wide banners in all folders, it looked pretty wierd.
One suggestion to solve this is to let the folder.jpg / default.tbn have different extensions for square or wide.. (ex: folder.jpg and folder.jpw).. something like that.
So when in "wide views" check if the folder.jpw exists, and fall back to folder.jpg if it doesn't. Then in "square views" check if folder.jpg exists, and if not exist.. fall back to folder.jpw if that is present.
I dont even know if this is doable and it might need some more thinking about formats and fallbacks etc.
Even might loose the .jpg extension and use folder.tbn / folder.tbw (square/wide) for the folders and default.tbn/default.tbw for other..
timdog82001
2007-01-03, 22:31
i've thought about this several times in the past and wished something like this was in place, but never got around to suggesting it on here, and I'm betting I'm not the only one. I think this would be a GREAT feature, especially since you can see so much more on the screen with square icons than you can with the wide ones. The wide ones are pretty, but occasionally you might want to be able to see more at once. Of course you can still switch it to small icons, or big icons or whatever, but the icon images look pretty stupid when you have wide icons as the folder.jpgs. It just looks like a little line in the middle of a square box. It would also be nice for xboxes with multiple profiles, because one person might prefer wide icons, while another prefers square ones, and as things are presently, you can't easily switch between them.
regarding setting the cache to 460.
that would mean each icon would be cached at a 460x460 pixels !
the current default (192x192) means that icons are cached at approximately
405x81.
your suggestion would mean approx 1025x205. that's a "bit" overkill imo :p
Gamester17
2007-01-04, 21:55
hmm, I'm a bit confused. Now, all wide-icons so far use 760x160 as a template (because the is the tv.com TV-series banner size), but with XBMC cache set to 192 by default that means 446x82 pixels, right? ...might we not just as well set the cache a little bit higher so the 760x160 pixel standard is keept even for the cached tumbs?, that way only icons larger than 760x160 will be converted, or I'm I wrong?
What are the pros and cons? Uses to much memory in 720p?, uses to much memory at 1080i (who uses 1080i with XBMC anyway?)?
jmarshall
2007-01-04, 22:39
They're just too slow to load when scrolling in my experience. 192 is a reasonable compromise on speed/quality.
Ofcourse, bumping up will still give higher quality ones.
As for the "separate icons" issue - I'm not sure about this tbh - generally you just want one or the other IMO, and the view saving per folder handles remembering your choices. Plus, checking for an extra thumb causes an extra stat per file (ie slower directory retrieval).
Cheers,
Jonathan
ultrabrutal
2007-01-04, 23:55
Gamester17, I use 1080i in the menus which I find more crisp than 720p - especially when viewing images but also for text in menus... 720p for movie playback.
Only downsides to 1080i I have could are:
- AVI with multiple audio tracks fail to start because of too low audio
- Visualizations while playing back mp3 often skip. Could be fixed if it used the video setting (720p)
- half framerate for most stuff
maybe someone is interested in fetching those bijoux automatically? i opened a new thread (http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?p=122228) on that subject.
cheers