XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part2 Movie Library

In part one I looked at the music library, today we will be taking a look at the Movie library in XBMC / Aeon MQ4 Skin.

The screen shot below shows the default movie background image with the Darkness theme. You can see the movie titled “Drive”, this was the last movie I was watching and the playback progress was only 20% watched. You can use the up directional button on the remote control and select Continue Watching, to quickly continue playback of  that movie.

Movies Main Menu



I have now turned on rotating movie fanart images for the movies main menu.







To do this use the Artwork Organizer add-on to copy your artwork from the individual movie folders on your server to a local folder on the HTPC.



You then select the Customisations option from the bottom menu.



Select the Movie menu heading and then select Change Backdrop Multiple Images



Browse to the local folder on the HTPC that the Artwork Organizer add-on created for Movie Fanart



On my Linux Ubuntu system this path was: /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/addon_data/script.artworkorganizer/MovieFanart

Note: You may also need to select the option in the XBMC settings to see hidden files and folders, before you can browse to this hidden location.

The top menu with the View Modes works like it did with the music library, so you can change the View Modes to: In Progress, Random, Recently Added



I didn’t mention this in part one and probably should have done, but each main menu heading has a submenu, to access this submenu you simply press the down directional button on the remote control.
You can then select things like Genres, Recently Added, Titles, Search, Update Library and more as I have hidden a bunch of submenu items in the customisations.

That’s the other great thing about this skin you can customise all the menus and the look and feel of the whole menu system, no more messing about with the now buggy Media Center Studio and battling with Microsoft to edit system .dll files that get reset.



Movie Library Views

Wall view - with Media Case turned on.



Wall view – with Media Case turned off.



As I have migrated from a Windows MCE / My Movies.dk system I already had a folder.jpg (Movie cover) and a fanart.jpg (Background image) for each of my movies. The covers you can see being displayed in these screen shots, are my folder.jpg images from the My Movies.dk system as are the fanart images.

Now I imagine if you were starting from scratch with no existing artwork for your movies then it would be the “The Movie Database” aka themoviedb.org inbuilt scraper in XBMC, that would get you the basic artwork such as covers and a single fanart image for each movie.

There is also an add-on available for XBMC called Artwork Downloader and this is used to get extra fanart for movies and TV Shows, but can also be used to obtain posters, now poster.jpg files are movie covers same as folder.jpg, however posters take priority over folder.jpg. So if like me you wanted to have your existing movie covers be displayed in the XBMC movie library, then I had to ensure that in the Artwork Downloader add-on I did not select posters to be downloaded.

Just for the record I am currently using the My Movies.dk scraper add-on in XBMC and also have the My Movies software on the WHS server, set to create metadata .nfo .tbn files for movies / XBMC. This may change and I may end up ditching My Movies.dk on the back-end altogether! Unless they update the XBMC integration sooner rather than later.

Movie Title Information

Like with the Album and Artist Information screens I showed in part one, we also have Movie Information, this information is usually handled I believe by the inbuilt “The Movie Database” scraper.

You can see in the screen shot below I have some extra artwork being displayed on the right hand side, a logo and a clearart image. I haven’t worked out yet exactly where the actor pictures come from?
The synopsis text is currently coming from the .nfo files that the My Movies.dk system creates.



Movie Views continued

Movies View - 3D Wall

Cant wait to see this on a home cinema screen!



Movies View - Poster

In this screen shot you will notice I have changed the original Blu-ray cover image from MyMovies.dk to a poster cover image. Also there is a Trailer Available option, most movies scanned in to the XBMC system using the Universal Movie Scraper, then have an option to play a trailer for that movie title.

Movies View - Large List



Movies View – Panel



Movies View – Banner

Displays the banner.jpg files, looks good but missing banner artwork lets it down



Movies View – Panel Logo

Displays the logo.png files, again looks good but missing logos let it down



Movie View – ShowArt

Displays the clearart.png files



Movie Information Panel appears in from the top down



Movie View – Landscape

Displays the landscape.jpg files if available if not it displays the movie covers



Movie View – ShowCase with Extra Thumbnail Style



Movie Genres

Custom genre icons and backgrounds added to the skin setup

New Movie Trailers

For new movie trailers for movie titles that are not currently in your collection, there are two Trailers add-ons which I looked at, one called "The Trailers" and the other called "Apple iTunes Trailers" both add-ons are very similar and I believe they both play trailers from Apple.
Both streamed the trailers from the Internet well, however both have some issues with the Aeon MQ4 skin, if extra fanart is enabled in the skin for movies, then when the trailers add-ons are launched I get a Script Failed addon.py message. Turning off extra fanart makes this error go away but then you lose extra fanart background images for your movies in the library.
Also with both Trailer add-ons I was unable to setup the download options to download the trailers to a network share, they would download to a local path on the HTPC however.

I am currently using "The Trailers" add-on as that one shows a synopsis for each movie trailer the other add-on did not do this. I set it up so trailers are accessed from the Movies submenu as you can see in the screen shot below.

Movie Trailers in Poster view

Artwork Downloader add-on

As I already said, I used the Artwork Downloader add-on to try and get the extra artwork for my Movies and TV Shows, you simply tell it what types of artwork you would like it to download and then from the movie library push up on to the top menu, go to the Add-ons pull down menu and select Auto Mode. It took about 4 hours on my system to complete the artwork download, so you may want to run it over night. If you would like to see the thread I started asking questions about the Artwork Downloader add-on its here.



One important setting is in the Advanced area, you need to enable USE LOCAL FILES so that the artwork image files will be stored in each movies / TV shows folder on your server. Set this before you start Auto Mode.



Summary

The Movie Library in the Aeon MQ4 skin looks stunning, there are plenty of views to choose from and you will probably never use all of them, the extra artwork looks amazing but missing artwork really spoils the look of it all. There seems to be allot of missing artwork for the movies in my collection, so for now I think I will stick with the more basic views like Wall, hopefully in the future more artwork on the fanart.tv website will become available.

Overall I am very impressed with this skin and the artwork add-ons that support it. The developers in the XBMC community certainly do a great job and as you can see in these screen shots the results really show!






www.phaze1digital.com

XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part1 Music Library

Today I am going to be looking at the Aeon MQ4 Skin with the Darkness theme on XBMC Frodo Version 12.1 running on Linux Ubuntu 12.10 Minimal with 3.8.6 kernel.

I’ve been working on XBMC / Ubuntu for the last 3 months and I am nearly done now, except for Live TV which will be my next project. The hardest thing about Windows Media Center was getting the Video Codec setup correctly, the hardest thing about XBMC in my opinion apart from having to learn some Linux is the Artwork. The Aeon series of skins have for some time been my favourites and Aeon MQ4 is simply stunning, its very graphical when compared to MCE and requires allot more artwork other than covers and fanart.

Still sat on the fence about Windows MCE or if to migrate to XBMC? Maybe this series of blog posts might convince you to switch.

MUSIC – Main Menu

The screen shot below, is the standard background image with the Darkness theme for the Music menu, however you can change this to rotating fanart images from your music collection, so random pictures of your artists will be displayed in the background when you are on this menu. You can do the same for the Movies and TV Shows menus and have rotating fanart of your Movies and TV Shows.

I used the add-on Artwork Organizer which is a script that copies all your artwork images from your file server, in to a series of local folders, you then change a setting in the skin customisation and point it to one of these local folders containing all the fanart etc.



Rotating or changing fanart background images of music artists, whilst on the music main menu.

Elvis


Cheryl Cole


U2


If you use the Up Directional button on the remote control you can push up to a top menu, here you can select different View Modes for both Albums and Tracks.
“In Progress” which appears to then display along the top menu, 10 albums I have been playing.



“Recently Added” – Shows the last 10 albums or tracks added to my music library.



"Random” – Shows random 10 albums or tracks depending on the View Mode you have selected.



In this screen shot I have started playing the album Bob Marley & the Wailers Live!



When playing an album the random fanart background images become no longer random and will now only show fanart images of Bob Marley & the Wailers.

However if playing a compilation album with various artists then you will continue to see random artist fanart being displayed.


After a period of inactivity with the remote control, you can see the main menu is replaced with the track times. Use the directional buttons on the remote and the main menu headings come back again.



Music Playing – Full Screen

Here you can see what the full screen looks like, I have opted to display both background fanart and a music visualization.



Artwork

This series of blog posts are not intended as step by step setup guides as it has taken me weeks to work out all the artwork in XBMC / Aeon MQ4 and there is simply too much to cover in a reasonably amount of time when writing about the subject. However these posts are intended as a basic overview and will hopefully give new users migrating from MCE like me, a basic understanding of what artwork add-ons are required and what they do.



Here you can see an album playing that had no cdart and you just get a blank spinning CD disc. Also there is no artist logo so it just displays a music note.



Music Library – Album Views

Music Albums - Wall view

My default view as it looks like Windows Media Center



Music Albums - 3D Wall – A beautiful view but on large collections I find it a little time consuming to find what you are looking for as you can only view / select from one row.



Music Albums - List View


Music Albums - Showcase view


Music Albums - Low List view

Note the artist logo being displayed in the bottom right.



Track List of the Duran Duran Arena album



Album Information screen

For each album you can select to view its Album Information using the right click context menu. The album information if available is downloaded by the inbuilt Universal Album Scraper.

In this albums case there is no album description and some of the other information is unavailable. The albums you can see at the bottom are not necessarily on my system they are simply the Discography of the currently playing artist. This Discography information is displayed by the Artist SlideShow add-on I believe.



If you push the directional button down on to one of the Discography albums it just displays a large image of that album cover.



Here you can see an album who’s album information is fully populated.You can see some text which is the album description and the Moods, Styles, Themes are populated.

Note: Because I am still playing Duran Duran in the background it is their album discography that gets
displayed not R.E.M’s.



Music Library – Artist Views

This is my default view for Artists – Low List



Initially to ensure each artist had a single fanart background image and a thumb image, that’s the square image of the artist you can see in the bottom left, I used the inbuilt Universal Artists Scraper. This is powered by various metadata websites including TheAudioDB.com website. I found that the Universal Artists Scraper did a pretty good job and got fanart and thumb images for most of my album artists, however for those that it did not, I registered on TheAudioDB.com website and created new pages for my missing artists and I contributed, I uploaded images and bio’s I found on Google, I was then able to ensure I had basic information and more importantly images for each artist in my collection.



Once I had the basics up and running with the Universal Artists Scraper, I then later used the CDArt Manager add-on to download extra fanart, cdart, clearlogo's, banners, ártist thumbs.

Music Artists - List view



Music Artists – Wall view



Music Artists – 3D Wall view



Music Artists – Showcase view



Artist Information

Like the album information you can right click to bring up the context menu on an artist and select artist information. The Universal Artists Scraper is used to obtain the artist information metadata.



Music Genres - Custom icons and background images

Summary

Well I think that is it for part 1. As you can see XBMC with the Aeon MQ4 skin is allot more graphical than the Windows Media Center Music Library, but that also means allot more work getting artwork organised but I think the effort is worth the results of how the user interface ends up looking!

The only real issue I have now with the XBMC music library is that the Artist SlideShow add-on seems a bit buggy and has a tendency to crash after I stop playback sometimes or start playing a new album, it then does not work properly until I reboot the HTPC. Hopefully the add-on developers can sort this out at some point?

If you are in the process of migrating from Windows Media Center to XBMC we would love to hear about your progress, thoughts and feedback.




www.phaze1digital.com

Finally stopped Windows Media Player–Overwriting Folder.jpg files ?

If you have been using Windows Media Player / Windows Media Center for any length of time, you will know that WMP is a bugger for overwriting your hi-res Folder.jpg files in your albums folders.

As a result I have never embedded album cover images in to the MP3 files, as if you do that WMP will then take it upon its self to overwrite my hi-res 600x600 Folder.jpg images with a crappy low-res 200x200 Folder.jpg, which Windows Media Center will then cache and you end up with terrible looking album covers in MCE on your TV.

If you don’t embed the cover images in to the MP3 files, then MCE will pickup and cache your nice hi-res Folder.jpg image. This has been working fine for me in Windows 7 / Media Center.

However iTunes requires that the cover image is embedded in the MP3 files, which is why I have never used iTunes fully. We just got a 27” Apple iMAC computer and I plan to use iTunes and get in to all that stuff.

Also developing a new XBMC system at the moment and I am currently working out all the artwork in XBMC, which there is allot more of with all the add-ons for cdArt, ClearArt, FanArt and all that carry on. From my tests XBMC will just pickup and cache the Folder.jpg that’s in the albums folder, so if that Folder.jpg has been molested by WMP, you again end up with a crappy 200x200 cover image in XBMC on the TV. Seems XBMC does not display / cache the embedded hi-res cover images in the MP3 files.

Long story short WMP is and always has been a pain in the arse with Microsoft not knowing what they are doing with artwork images. There is nothing you can do in the WMP settings to stop this behaviour and I always thought there was no way to stop it overwriting Folder.jpg files if you embed cover images.
However a new search today and I have found a genius who apparently has come up with a solution, in my initial basic tests I can confirm that it does appear to work, but I need you to test and confirm as well!

On your Windows PC go in to regedit then browse to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences

Create two new DWORD entries

LargeAlbumArtSize
SmallAlbumArtSize

Give them the value of:  ffffffff  and then reboot.  You will need to do this on every Windows PC where WMP looks at your music files.

This Voodoo Magic appears to totally stop WMP overwriting your hi-res Folder.jpg files and even stops it creating the AlbumArtSmall.jpg files.

If this does indeed pan out and works as I think it does, it will finally mean I can embed the hi-res cover images in to all the MP3 files and then be able to add my music collection in to iTunes. Also both MCE and XBMC will pickup the un-molested hi-res Folder.jpg file and cache them for display on the TV.
Thank $%^& for that!

On this screen shot you can see I have embedded the hi-res cover image in to the MP3 files, I used MP3TAG. You can see that my Folder.jpg is still 600x600 and there is no AlbumArtSmall.jpg file in sight!
 

 
The only issue I can see is with Media Center extenders, I imagine you would have to load their user registry hive to be able to make this edit for the extender user accounts. As I only have one MCX and I plan to ditch it along with Windows Media Center, when my new XBMC system is up and running HAHA I don’t really care about that!

UPDATE:

I embedded all my hi-res 600x600 Folder.jpg files in to all my music files, I did it rather quickly using the Actions Import Cover feature of MP3Tag, would have taken weeks manually!

However today I have noticed in some albums folders, not all of them, just seems random in some album folders, there are files like these being created:

AlbumArt_{E6043A2C-BBEB-49C5-BCF0-5259B6332C34}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{E6043A2C-BBEB-49C5-BCF0-5259B6332C34}_Small.jpg

The large one is 200x200 the small one is 75x75

I have double checked several Folder.jpg files and they have remained untouched at 600x600 and not down-res to 200x200 this is good news! However this creation of these Large / Small jpg files is an annoying side affect that I would like to be able to stop them being created all together, but not sure how ?

I posted the question on MS Answers here

SoundGraph VF310 15c2:0036 Linux / XBMC

I have an OrigenAE M10 HTPC case which has a SoundGraph IR/VFD unit – Model: VF310 15c2:0036. This is the LCD display on the front of the HTPC case. Before I attempted to get the LCD display working under Linux Ubuntu 12.10 minimal and XBMC V12.0 Frodo, I had read several forum threads and it sounded very difficult to set this up under Linux especially with this particular model, however it turned out to be quite simple.

I already have the IR receiver working in MCE mode, I did have difficulties with this and was having issues with double presses / commands from the remote being sent to XBMC. I had installed LIRC initially and I think that and the inbuilt modules in the kernel for iMon where conflicting, in the end I uninstalled LIRC and only used the in kernel modules. I followed this user guide here and the “Do everything completely in-kernel”" option to get the MCE (Logitech Harmony) remote control working properly. You can see some comments I made on that thread here. I am not going to cover the setup of the remote control here as I had allot of problems with it.

Anyways I am looking at the LCD display today not the remote control setup. This is how I got it working. I also started a thread about it here on the XBMC forum.

To double check which VFD unit you have from terminal type

lsusb

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 15c2:0036 SoundGraph Inc. LC16M VFD Display/IR Receiver

1. From terminal I installed LCDProc

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lcdproc

I then read the relevant parts of the LCDProc user manual here.

2. Edit the LCDd.conf file located in /etc

cd /etc
sudo nano LCDd.conf

Scroll down to the [Server] section and change this line from:

Driver=curses

To:

Driver=imon

Note: There is also an imonlcd driver I tried this initially but I just got garbled text on the display.

Scroll a bit further down to the Welcome and Goodbye messages, change these to suit your requirements. These messages are displayed when the HTPC is turned on from shutdown and when it is shutting down.

# Hello message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
#Hello="  Welcome to"
#Hello="   LCDproc!"

# GoodBye message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
#GoodBye="Thanks for using"
#GoodBye="   LCDproc!"

Change this setting:

# If yes, the the serverscreen will be rotated as a usual info screen. If no,
# it will be a background screen, only visible when no other screens are
# active. The special value 'blank' is similar to no, but only a blank screen
# is displayed. [default: on; legal: on, off, blank]
#ServerScreen=on

To:

ServerScreen=blank

You need to remove the comment # in front of it to make the setting active.
I wanted to slow down the speed that the text scrolls across the LCD display, I tried changing this setting but it does not seem to do anything?

# set title scrolling speed [default: 10; legal: 0-10]
#TitleSpeed=10

I change it to:

TitleSpeed=1

Save and exit the LCDd.conf file to do that press Ctrl+X on the keyboard then Y then hit enter.

3. In the XBMC settings in System enable the option for LCD/VFD

4. Edit the LCD.xml fie. There is an LCD.xml file in your userdata folder, you can customise and change
this file if required? You can read more about the LCD.xml file here.

I did make one change to the file and that was:

From this:

<navigation>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentWindow]</line>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentControl]</line>
      <line>Freemem: $INFO[System.FreeMemory]</line>
      <line>$INFO[System.ScreenWidth]x$INFO[System.ScreenHeight] $INFO[System.ScreenMode]</line>
   </navigation>

To this:

<navigation>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentWindow]</line>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentControl]</line>
      <line>Transport Controls</line>
   </navigation>

Because when I navigated in the XBMC GUI over the transport controls like Play / Pause / Stop etc the second line on the display would output my free memory like this: FREEMEM: 3382MB I don’t know why it does not display the name of the current transport control you are on? So I changed it to simply read “Transport Controls”


5. Reboot and your LCD display should now be working!

This is what gets displayed when nothing is happening

XBMC Running….
Current date and time..

You can change this in the LCD.xml file in the general section.



When I navigate around the XBMC GUI the second line on the display shows what Menu item I am currently on?





Here I am playing a music track Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus, the track play and remaining times are also shown. You can change what gets displayed for music playback in the music section of the LCD.xml file.



Not very clear in the photo, but I am currently highlighting one of the transport controls in the XBMC GUI and “Transport Controls” now scrolls across the screen whenever I do this.



Here I am now in my movie library in XBMC and as I navigate over the different movie titles, if I pause on a title it displays that titles name on the LCD display.



Here I am playing a movie – E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial



This is a bit funky, when in the System settings area and also when I am on some of the other system type menus it looks like this



Summary

The only other slight issue is that when I shutdown the HTPC (S5 Shutdown) the Goodbye message stays on the screen and the LCD display does not turn off. However if I put the HTPC in to S3 Sleep mode instead then the LCD display is turned off and the Goodbye message is not displayed. Also the Welcome message does not stay on the display long enough for my liking.

Overall I am very pleased that the LCD display is now working as I thought it would be a complete nightmare to setup and actually it was relatively simple. I wish I could say the same for setting up the IR MCE remote control, as that was a nightmare!

Please keep in mind I do not have LIRC installed, if you are using LIRC for your remote control this may or may not work ?
 
 
 
Phaze1 Digital