Music Videos in the Music Library/Database

[phantom22]

now don't yell at me for not searching before posting. I tried... honest, but I couldn't search for the specific phrase "Music Video" and just about every post here is about music and videos... anyway, here goes.

I figured out that by throwing an AVI of the music video into the album folder, and changing the database entry for the corresponding song to have the filename ending with a .avi extension, every time that song is called up, it plays the music video... very very spiffy. Is there an easier way to do this than downloading the database, manually editing it, uploading and rebooting? If not, then that's my suggestion. Like a "Change Target" command in the context menu.

[El Piranna]

I wanted it too!!!:nod:

[shizzle]

it would be awesome

[El Piranna]

Another little (future) feature: show thumbnail of video instead of CD cover (yes, i LOVE iTunes... :p )

[phantom22]

the thumbnail shouldn't be an issue, just save the image as [song_filename].tbn and XBMC will use that instead of the folder.jpg for that specific file. Am I understanding your question, correctly?

[El Piranna]

the thumbnail shouldn't be an issue, just save the image as [song_filename].tbn and XBMC will use that instead of the folder.jpg for that specific file. Am I understanding your question, correctly?

Yeah, i knew that, but i wanted that XBMC would be able to take video thumbnails by itself, and with the music video option it would be very usefull to identify when is a video and when is music :)

[phantom22]

Yes, I saved the video thumbnail in the folder... you can probably just delete the thumbnail cache, and it will reload them correctly, but I just added the thumbnail as it was to the music database, and changed the song entry to point to that thumbnail, works fine.

[phantom22]

alright, I did just notice an issue: you can't Queue videos from the music library. and they won't show up in party mode.

[phantom22]

After some more playing, this is what I've noticed:


XBMC Music Library can be tricked into playing a video file instead of a song by replacing the file name in the database
It is however, smart enough to not allow queuing of video files from the music library. Playing an album (not queuing it first) works fine, but party mode is out of the question. *sad bear*
When watching a video in a mixed playlist (foreground) skipping will cause the screen to go black. I assume this is because the video player is still active, the song plays, but the visualization doesn't kick in. If you let the video play to the end, it switches just fine.
If the video is in the background, the above problem doesn't occur, and the visualization kicks in normally...


also, I nice feature would be to disable videos automatically going foreground when in the music library, or in a music playlist.

I've tried adding .avi and .mp4 to the musicextensions in advancedsettings.xml, but this didn't remedy any of the problems.

[phantom22]

El piranna, I just realized what you were saying. and yes, it would be great to take screen shots of the video as it plays on the xbox and assign that as the thumbnail for the video. Cooler yet would be if it added those classy looking filmstrip borders with the holes... think newline cinema's logo.

and Also, I just realized I was wrong. Can someone tell me how to edit my posts?

Smart playlists WILL include video files, so they'll queue up in party mode. The weirdness comes in when you try to manually queue them, either individually or as an album (maybe even as a separate playlist)

I'm looking for a better way to add the videos into the music database.

[El Piranna]

El piranna, I just realized what you were saying. and yes, it would be great to take screen shots of the video as it plays on the xbox and assign that as the thumbnail for the video.

Hehe... :p

Cooler yet would be if it added those classy looking filmstrip borders with the holes... think newline cinema's logo.

Really i don't like to modify images, but it's a good idea... but not for series, Maybe the filmstrip would be ok for movies without cover (if there's no thumbnail available, use a frame instead of it), but for Tv Shows it must be a TV, no other. Music videos... well, think about MTv :D

and Also, I just realized I was wrong. Can someone tell me how to edit my posts?

No way, anybody can't. Forum rules... :(

Smart playlists WILL include video files, so they'll queue up in party mode. The weirdness comes in when you try to manually queue them, either individually or as an album (maybe even as a separate playlist)

I'm looking for a better way to add the videos into the music database.

Someone has say "iTunes Way of Life" :p (Yes, i know: i love Macs :D ). The best option would be the iTunes style: only one database for all metadata, instead of XBMC way of several micro-db. The most i love XBMC, the most i would like that it would be rewritten from scratch to solve alls that hacked pachts it has for everything... :no:

[ShortySco]

The most i love XBMC, the most i would like that it would be rewritten from scratch to solve alls that hacked pachts it has for everything... :no:

I Think this is already underway if i understand correctly, while porting to linux, the coders are cleaning up all the hacks that can be cleaned. As it's gonna be cross platform any changes to this should affect XBMC aswel as Linux XBMC (LBMC, LMC or whatever it's gonna be called). I think this process will take a good long while though.

As for your ideas they are pretty cool, i'd love to have the video play minimized instead of the MP3, then just hit "X" to see it full.

And the auto thumb generation would be cool, i use the technique in the wiki currently, for my TV shows and it works a treat, this would be super cool though, especially with templates!

Shorty

[El Piranna]

I Think this is already underway if i understand correctly, while porting to linux, the coders are cleaning up all the hacks that can be cleaned. As it's gonna be cross platform any changes to this should affect XBMC aswel as Linux XBMC (LBMC, LMC or whatever it's gonna be called). I think this process will take a good long while though.

It's a really good news. Certainly, it's logical to do a reestructure while porting to Linux (you have to read all the code again to port to Linux, why not repair the hacks?). The problem comes with hardcorded core hacks. The most important at my point of view (and someone WILL kill me for telling that)... why we have a diferent window for MyVideos, MyMusic, MyPictures... instead only one window with diferent file kind views? And Python module (i can talk about this because i have used it) has the same problem: the objects doesn't have a logical heritage, only WindowXML who inherits from Window, the rest objects only inherits from Object. Isn't more logical that, for example, FadeLabel inherits from Label? Or why we have three media players (mplayer, paplayer, dvdplayer), and so on... and this is in the technicall part. because in the artistic part we have that XBMC doesn't have really 3D skins in a similar way of original DashBoard, for example. Yes, XBMC started just as a very good GUI for MPlayer, but now it's a lot more than just a MPlayer GUI... XBMC is a wonderful app and it's really great, but "under the skin" it has a lot of patches for patches for patches and the worst thing, a lot of code written twice (i supose, but i'm sure it's true for what i have read in all this months here).

As for your ideas they are pretty cool, i'd love to have the video play minimized instead of the MP3, then just hit "X" to see it full.

Thanks :D A pre-view of the videos, you say? Yeah, it's a good idea, too.

And the auto thumb generation would be cool, i use the technique in the wiki currently, for my TV shows and it works a treat, this would be super cool though, especially with templates!

Hehe :D

[jmarshall]

WTF has this got to do with this thread?

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about, so please don't pretend that you do.

Thanks,
Jonathan

[phantom22]

I'm kicking myself for following this tangent, but maybe just maybe i can bring you guys back here! I'm not sure combining the video and music database is such a good, easy, or practical idea. *maybe* if each media file was in one table with it's ID, path, file name, and type; you could include all the other tables in one DB. But the more I think about it, the more it doesn't make sense.

Changing the musicextensions didn't allow me to see AVI's in the music view, so I don't understand what the point of musicextensions is. Is there another step to adding advanced settings, or do I just have to create the xml? The other thought was: an info file, just plain text with the same file name and a different extension. It would include the information for the avi that would automatically be parsed from the mp3 tags, then we could avoid manually altering the database.

the last bit would be to not bring the video player to the foreground when playing a file from the music DB. unless of course the Visualization already has the foreground.

[jmarshall]

phantom22:

This XML file works fine:


<advancedsettings>
<musicextensions>
<add>.mp4|.avi</add>
</musicextensions>
</advancedsettings>


The .avi's show up in music files view no problem. One option for info would be some sort of external file as you suggest. Perhaps, infact, one could accomplish <some> of this already by use of a .cue sheet (containing just one track.)

Cheers,
Jonathan

[phantom22]

perhaps this should be in the bugs forum, because after some more fiddling I've seen that everything is there, but it's just not working very well.

here's what I did:
tagged an entire album with Tag&Rename
the album was 10 wma's and one mp4 video
there is one folder.jpg for the cover art
and one .tbn for the mp4
I upload and scan all to database.

here's what I get:
The wma's are scanned, the mp4 is not

So I changed the mp4 to a .m4a and rescanned.
It worked, but of course now it only plays the audio.
but it's not using the filename.tbn as it's thumbnail.

So, apparently there is the ability to read the tags from mp4 files into the music library, it just needs to be enabled. Also, I've had this difficulty before with the thumbnails, so far the only way around it is manually editing the database.

[jmarshall]

Cached album thumbnail takes priority over single thumbs if it's already been cached (as will happen in your case).

And yes, mp4 atoms are probably the same regardless of the content of the file (video/audio) so the tag reader probably doesn't have a problem with it.

The main problem with mp4 is that we currently only determine "type" purely on extension. If you right click-> Play with DVD Player or Play with Mplayer it'll probably work OK though. For audio, paplayer takes precedence otherwise (and it knows nothing about video). This is IMO the most important of the issues, but without actually loading + parsing the file, there's no way to tell. I'll see if there is anything obvious that can be done as far as MP4 specifically goes.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[jmarshall]

Surely adding .mp4 to the music extensions should in fact get everything working as you want it?

My (music only) .mp4's then show up and play fine using the video players (mplayer by default).

Seems like this will solve the major issue at hand with no work on our part ;)

[phantom22]

My room-mate is playing prince of persia right now, so this test may wait till morning but here's what I want to try:

Loading up an album without the folder.jpg, just the filename.tbn for the specific file. then after it's scanned adding the folder.jpg. if I understand correctly, the current thumbnail won't be replaced by the album thumb?

And your explanation of paplayer explains why it doesn't like the unexpected switch from video to audio, it probably just stays in Mplayer when you skip to the next track (thus no visualization?)

and yes, adding .mp4 to the musicextensions worked fine for file view, but it doesn't seem to be scanning them to the music library, so they won't show up in library view. When you "scan all to database" from the context menu, is this function affected by <musicextensions> ? or is there another extension list that controls what will and wont be scanned?

[jmarshall]

My .mp4 files scan in just fine. And yes, they're music only (generated with Nero recode or whatever it is)

[DarkHelmet]

I've given this some thought, because I've started to convert some of my music dvd's into avi files and tagging them with nfo files as music videos. They're added to my videos database and the music videos section of the music library.

What I would love is if my music videos could be integrated into the music database and show up as an album. For example album view of Guns N' Roses "Appetite", "Illusions I, "Illusions II" and then "Music Videos". This way I wouldn't have to switch the view from music to music videos and all my music videos would be sorted the way my whole music is.

Another fine thing of course would be if I could just add my music videos to music playlists or the now playing list by "enqueueing" them making this a mixed playlist handling my mp3 and avi tracks the same way. Now just nothing happens when I pick a music video and hit enqueue while music tracks are playing. Mixed playlists can be achieved through smart playlists but picking individual tracks for a smart playlist is quite tricky.

On a sidenote, why I chose avi as my format for music videos: Through some rather simple scripts I can adjust the volume of my videos to the same volume of my mp3's. Otherwise the files have quite different levels of volume. This was a whole lot more complicated in every other format I've tried.