XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part4 Everything else

In part one of this series we looked at the Music Library in part two the Movie library and in part three the TV Show library, in part four I will be looking at all the other areas of the user interface not previously covered.

Pictures

Pictures in XBMC is not a “Pictures Library”" like in Windows Media Center, its basically a folder and file view type of deal in XBMC, so you cannot filter on tags and years etc. I believe there is a 3rd party Picture Library add-on for XBMC but I have not looked at that yet.

Pictures main menu


Pictures source folder which is on my WHS server.


Picture Folders in the PhotoShow view


Picture Folders in the PhotoShow view


Individual Picture image files in the Photoshow view


Picture folders in List view


Picture folders in Wall view


You can play a picture slide show, I like to use picture slideshows whist listening to music playing. There are two options SlideShow and R.SlideShow, presuming R is for random.


Overall the pictures area of XBMC is not as good as Windows Media Center and I particularly miss the MCE photo screen saver, I have not found an XBMC screen saver add-on that can do the same?

This is the Windows MCE photo screen saver


Weather

I always liked having the MCE Heatwave add-on installed when it worked! in XBMC weather is native and is part of XBMC which is nice.

Weather main menu


Weather sub-menu

If you press down on the remote control you can access the sub-menus from any of the main menu items.

The weather sub-menu options are:
36 Hours / Weekend / 4 Days / 7 Days / Alerts / Settings

In the settings you can add more than one location for weather, although I did find it a little tricky then switching between the two locations.


This screen shot shows the 7 days option


If you select the main menu item for Weather you will enter the Weather UI proper. Here you can see there is a menu on the left and that Weekend is the currently selected item.



If you select the Maps item it brings up a satellite map.

Overall I really like the in-built Weather part of XBMC.

Concerts / Music Videos

Concerts main menu item


I haven’t spent a great deal of time using the Concerts area, when I initially set it up to point to my music videos stored on the WHS, I used the Last.FM Music Video XBMC scraper which did a decent enough job of adding the music videos in to the Concerts library. However since then that scraper has stopped working and now the only scraper available is theaudiodb.com/ which wasn’t as good at detecting things.
I believe and don’t quote me on this that your individual music video files should be named like:

artistname – songname.avi or .mov or whatever.

I also have two actual music concerts on DVD VIDEO_TS rips

As you can see in this screenshot not every music video got a poster / cover and some are just showing a thumbnail from the video file, for example the one in the bottom left hand corner has no cover image.



Cat Stevens – Majikat Concert - DVD rip


Elvis Presley – Aloha from Hawaii Concert – DVD rip


I am not totally sure if this Concerts area of XBMC is meant only for full concerts or individual music video files you have downloaded from the Internet? I need to spend more time using this area really to be more certain about it.

YouTube XBMC add-on

The YouTube area is an add-on and not a native part of XBMC.


I would say its functional but not as good as my previous Youtube integration with Windows Media Center.
You can login with your YouTube account to then link in your Playlists, Favourites and History etc.



Explore Youtube


Youtube Categories


Youtube videos in List view


You are able to search via the on screen keyboard


As I said the YouTube add-on is functional if nothing else. It has broken once in the time I have been using it, due to site changes made by Youtube on their site and the XBMC add-on developers were quick to release an update, most XBMC add-ons are updated automatically so the newly fixed update was just installed on to all my HTPCs when it was released so I never had to do anything!

Security Cameras

This was just a quick and dirty integration I did to get my two IP security camera streams in to XBMC using .strm files. I am still looking for a better solution / add-on for security camera integration with XBMC. I just wish Embedded Automation would get their act together and write an mControl XBMC add-on !





Summary

Well that’s it folks. I will probably cover Live TV integration next, but I need some funds for a new BlackGold TV Tuner card first before I get around to that. I will be using DVBLogic’s DVBLink software on the WHS server and their XBMC Live TV add-on.

XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part3 TV Show Library

In part one of this series we looked at the Music Library and in part two the Movie library, today I am going to look at the TV Show library.

Before we start I need to point out that XBMC does not properly support TV Series that are DVD VIDEO_TS rips or Blu-ray rips, to read more about these limitations see here.

Therefore you can assume that TV Series from DVD and Blu-ray discs should be ripped and then the episodes re-encoded in to individual video files such as .AVI or .MKV using a program such as Handbrake. Once I have figured out how to do this and automate it, I will probably do a blog post about the process.

For now we will assume that our TV Series episodes are already in individual video files and in the correct folder structure with the correct naming conventions, I currently use a program called TheRenamer to speed up the renaming of the files in to a format like: nameofTVseries – S01E01 – episodename.avi

In this screen shot you can see an example of a correct folder and file structure.



The default meta-data scraper for TV Shows in XBMC is TheTVDB your video files episode order should match the same order as in TheTVDB database, if your migrating from Windows Media Center / MyMoves.dk that also uses TheTVDB so you should already be good to go!

When I added my sources under TV Shows – Files in XBMC I assigned the content for my TV Shared folders to be: Folder Contains "TV Shows" and to use TheTVDB scraper as you can see in this screen shot. If your TV folder and file structure is correct you shouldn’t have any issues importing your content in to the XBMC TV Show library.


TV Shows – Main Menu

I have turned on rotating TV Show fanart images for the TV Show main menu, so that background image changes to the various different fanarts for the TV Shows in my collection.
Again we have a partially watched feature and you can see the last episode I was watching but didn’t finish and there is an option to Continue Watching. This partially watched feature and be turned off and disabled if desired.




Like with the Music and Movies if I push up on to the top menu, there is a View Modes, this screen shot is showing recently added episodes. You can also change the View Mode to Random and In Progress.



TV Show Library Views

Now I have all the extra artwork setup for TV Shows my new favourite view is this one which is Poster. You can see that the rating of TV PG is displayed along with the channel logo in this case The History Channel. The Year, Genre, Directed By and I believe the IMDB rating can also be displayed in the bottom left. The number of episodes and the TV Show title are shown at the bottom in the middle, next to that is a synopsis and next to that in the bottom right are the extra artwork images obtained by the XBMC Artwork Downloader add-on.



Here is another TV Show in the same Poster view



When I select a TV Show its takes me to a screen that looks like this, I prefer the Panel View for Seasons. You can see there is a cover image / poster for each Season and also for All Seasons and Specials. When highlighting a Season a season image and synopsis are shown on the left hand side.



If I then select a season I am taken to the Episodes View. In this case I prefer a list view for episodes.
Each episode has its own image and synopsis. The ticks you can see next to each episode means I have already watched them. As I have setup on my WHS server, a central MySQL database for use with XBMC and multiple HTPC’s around the house, this watched or unwatched status is shown in every room!

Episode 1:


Episode 12:


If I press Info on the remote control whilst on an episode that episodes Information page is then displayed. Here you can see we get a bit more information and some actors images are shown.



If I start to playback the episode and whilst its playing if I press Info on the remote again, it looks like the screen shot below. Not sure what they call it? Information overlay perhaps, but you get the Plot of the episode, who’s starring in the episode. We also can see along the bottom the various Media Info icons, one nice feature about XBMC with this skin is the “Current Time” and “Ends At” you can see in the bottom right corner, along with the extra artwork images above that.



TV Show Library – Other views

TV Show – Showcase View


TV Show - Showcase View with drop down panel


TV Show – 3D Wall View


TV Show – Wall View


TV Show – List View


TV Show – Banner Info View


TV Show – Banner Info View with drop down panel


TV Show – Banner View


TV Show – Panel Logo View


TV Show – Panel Landscape View


TV Show – Panel View


TV Show – ShowArt View


TV Show – ShowArt View with drop down panel


TV Show – Landscape View


TV Show – Landscape View with drop down panel


Summary

Wow as you can see you are spoilt for choice with the number of gorgeous looking views to choose from! I don’t have a large TV Show collection but the Artwork Downloader add-on did a good job of obtaining the extra artwork images and most were available for the TV Shows in my collection.  I think the TV Show library in XBMC with the Aeon MQ4 skin is fantastic, the main issue when migrating from MCE / MyMovies.dk is that XBMC does not properly support TV Shows from discs rips and it is expected that your episodes are to be in individual video files. Hopefully an automated solution using Handbrake will be the answer to this but I need to investigate.

Overall I am very pleased with how the TV Show library ended up looking and  how it functions. Next in Part four I will be looking at all the other areas of the user interface not covered so far, like Pictures, Weather, Concerts and the YouTube add-on.
Things for the future? I will be eventually looking at Live TV integration within XBMC and setup for an automated downloading system for new Movie and TV Show content.

My Movies.dk keep it or ditch it ???

This is a follow up post to my Part 2 in the XBMC Frodo / Aeon MQ4 Skin series.

As I stated in part 2 I am currently using My Movies.dk metadata for movies for use with XBMC. There is an option in either the Collection Management program or in the settings in the WHS version of My Movies to enable metadata file creation for XBMC, if enabled My Movies will then create a .nfo and .tbn files in each movies folder. XBMC can read these files and import the metadata provided by My Movies. I’ve been using this feature in conjunction with the My Movies scraper add-on for XBMC.

Now I always knew this day would come when I would have to make a decision if to keep My Movies database on the back-end server or if to ditch it. Today is that day I feel!

With the help of my new friend Samu-rai on the XBMC forums I have compared the data displayed for movies by My Movies metadata and the XBMC scraper called “Universal Movie Scraper” and the results are clear as to who the winner is and its not My Movies.

I’ve been a long time user and supporter of the My Movies.dk system and the team there. I don’t think I could have used Windows Media Center to the extent I did if it were not for My Movies.

Some reasons why I still like My Movies:

The My Movies system works well for disc titles, i.e. movies that have been released already on DVD or Blu-ray disc, its not so good for metadata for films that are still in the cinema e.g. pirate movies but that’s a good thing right.

The TV Series support for DVD disc rips is excellent and MCE can directly play episodes, XBMC cannot do this yet! I wrote a whole thing about the limitations of TV Series on DVD rips in XBMC here

My Movies does other good things like the personal Online Collection website and the iOS / Android app. They are planning on updating the remote control on the mobile apps to be able to control XBMC as well as MCE.

I still like using the Collection Management software for managing my titles but if I move to a XBMC scraper that kinda becomes somewhat redundant.

My Movies is also IMHO still the best automatic disc ripping / downloader of metadata, you need AnyDVD HD in the back ground and My Movies ripper does the rest. I haven't seen any solutions for a fully automated disc ripping service in XBMC.

The My Movies development team I believe do have plans to revamp their entire XBMC integration but this is not the highest priority for them which we understand as they don’t make money on XBMC client users so much if any.

They are already working on updating the XBMC metadata integration that is including in the MAC OSX version of Collection Management so that is a good thing, it just needs updating for WHS and Windows Server but I am not sure I can wait.

My Movies metadata for Bolt

Universal Movie Scraper for Bolt

My Movies metadata for Madagascar 2

Universal Movie Scraper for Madagascar 2

My Movies metadata for Nemo
Universal Movie Scraper for Nemo

I am going to have to sleep on this one, but I am thinking I will delete all the My Movies .nfo and .tbn files and rebuild my XBMC Movie Library using the XBMC Universal Movie Scraper instead.

Which unfortunately makes the My Movies.dk system for me pretty much not required any more as I have no MCE HTPCs now in the house! I may keep it on the server for Disc ripping though.