FanArt backdrop support in XBMC's skinning-engine and scrapers (for Music and Videos)

[Mntz]

This idea comes from the Centerstage team. (and already implemented in Mediaportal by plugin)

"Fan Art, is a downloadable iTunes Music store-esque page. It
is simply a skin and re-layout of the information page but
with some slight tweaks. As we have seen, the ability to press
and hold the Play button brings up all the metadata available
for an item on the Information Page. The way Fan Art works is
that default Information page is replaced by Fan Art if a Fan
Art page has been downloaded and installed for that item."

So people can make their own fanart (images/colors) for movies/music and upload it to the projectwebsite. (thetvdb.com?)
At the moment there already is a website containing over 700 images for music, films and series.

It seems the Centerstage and Mediaportal devs are discussing the implementation of this feature so there can be some sort of fanart-standard.
Maybe a good idea for xbmc to join the fun

centerstage topic about fanart

Example normal vs fanart:

[timdog82001]

I agree this could be very cool and really make it sparkle. Something to look into anyway I would think..

[Gamester17]

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/fa...0.html?t=28830



interesting, especially for TV-Shows I think, ...someone should suggest it to TheTVDB.com (and their sister site Movie-XML for movies)

[EDIT]: Why don't you try PM Scott Zsori (a.k.a. szsori), he is the owner of those sites and a member of this XBMC community forums

[jmarshall]

I'm sure you all realize that there's more to it than just a backdrop!

Notice that the skin is changed pretty much completely.

[Mntz]

Yeah, a fanartdownload would be a backdrop and some colorvalues to change skincolors. The fanartpagelayout stays the same though. (But can be offcourse different depending on the skin.)

Some more examples:

[Jezz_X]

Look I have to admit it looks nice and I would like it added too but those examples to me are just 50% wasted space
Like I said on irc though it would all have to be cached locally on the xbox/linux box because the time to load these sorts of images over a network share for every folder would be very long indeed ( 2 to 5 seconds depending on size ) and for that time it would look dull and odd.
that being said on Implimentaion side of things A tag like <info>Container.FanArt<info>
with a FanArt.tbn (not really a tbn thumbnail I know) stored like folder.tbn would probably do it

[BritneysPAIRS]

would be nice to have <info>Container.FanInfo<info> and FanInfo.txt as well to scroll some text up about a picture movie music or whatever.

I think this looks great personally

umm also FanInfo.jpg so the whole folder of stuff can use the Artwork would be helpfull and save having to make every file have artwork

[Gamester17]

Originally Posted by jmarshall

I'm sure you all realize that there's more to it than just a backdrop!

Notice that the skin is changed pretty much completely.

Yes, and therefor IMHO it should only be added to the VideoInfo view for movies and same for TV-Shows, ...the only extreme is Album view for music.

[Gamester17]

How much work would it be to add FanArt backdrop support to XBMC's skinning-engine?, ...meaning adding it to libGUI code, and not the skins XML (as that would come only later after XBMC's skinning-engine already supports FanArt backdrops).

Could it maybe be ported from MediaPortal for a faster and eaiser implementation into XBMC?
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/my_tvseries-f162.html
I believe it is open source in "My TVSeries" (the MediaPortal MyTV-Series plugin)

[szsori]

For anyone interested, I'm considering adding Fan Art support to my site (TheTVDB.com). I already explained elsewhere that if I do this, the art will have different requirements than the current Fan Art available. Instead of people putting gradients into these images to get them to work with specific software and skins, I'd want them as "stock" as possible. It would then be up to the software/skins to overlay the proper gradient/alpha channel/whatever to make it look right for their users. It would be slightly harder getting it to work for XBMC as a result, but it would work for any skin/view layout.