User Fanart

[Psycho Reptile]

Actually, I don't mind changing the skin files (I'm doing it atm), however if the general layout of FanArt remains the same I have no problem - if everyone uses the same general layout it won't be a headache for skinners .

[nylonhof]

Originally Posted by Psycho Reptile

Actually, I don't mind changing the skin files (I'm doing it atm), however if the general layout of FanArt remains the same I have no problem - if everyone uses the same general layout it won't be a headache for skinners .

Puh, that is a good answer for me. The WAF is the highest with the Replicant skin....

Regards
nylonhof

[Inker]

Originally Posted by nylonhof

I love this Fan Art feature a lot. So much that I might even update our living room HTPC with 0.2.3.0 RC1 (contrary to my guideline only to install stable builds there).

However there is one thing that I keep wondering about:

Most of the Fan Art pictures assume that the right side of the screen is where the series banner, season & episode listing is located. However there are some skin designs out there (f.e. ReVision/Replicant) where this information is displayed on the left side (by design). This means that the skinner has to decide if he is changing his screen layout for the MP-TV Series plugin to fit the Fan Art or if he creates new Fan Art files for all the shows. Has anybody thought about this?

Regards
nylonhof

Thats true, and it is indeed the biggest problem with it I think. But basically there are three scenarios:
1) stick with your skin and not use fanart
2) stick with your skin, but replace the tvseries.xml with a fanart compatible skin and use fanart
3) upgrade your skins xml

I know its not ideal, but I really can't think of a way to solve this.

I'm really more concerned for 4:3 users (next bugfixing release will contain a skin file for B2 4:3) and if anybody is going to create any fanart they can use. Everything so far is 16:9 ;-) But perhaps the screan real-estate, paired with the typically smaller 4:3 tvs doesn't merit using fanart anyways?

[G.B. Wolf]

Originally Posted by Inker

as those images are pretty large (I've seen anywhere from 200k - 1,3 mb!, typically in the 500k region).

Hmm... feeding a serverside script with the images and rework them automatically to a good size/quality-rating could do the job.

Originally Posted by Inker

I'm really more concerned for 4:3 users (next bugfixing release will contain a skin file for B2 4:3) and if anybody is going to create any fanart they can use.

So you're working on B2? Then I won't invest any time in it...

[scythelt]

Originally Posted by polargeek

I am and my initial thought would be no just because it could possibly be a huge storage and bandwidth addition.

Image weight is a concern no doubt. It would increase bandwidth a fair bit. Incidentally, is there a donation program for thetvseries to support a possible bandwidth increase?

Keep in mind the fan art should only have to be downloaded once - it would be nice if the tvseries plugin should be smart enough to check when a user requests an online refresh, whether an image has changed. If it hasn't, skip redownloading it - yet still download new or updated art.

An alternative is to automatically generated thumbnails on upload of fanart, and then the tvseries config displays a "browse fanart for this series" displaying the thumbnails. The user would then select the fanart they like, which then downloads and is assigned to a series. That would mean all backgrounds for all series aren't automatically downloaded - only a specific one on request of the user.

It just seems a shame to me that all this great fanart has to be manually added while one of the great strengths of the tvseries plugin is that the banners/coverart are so nicely integrated and accessible via thetvdb online database. If we could come up with a solution to make fanart available in the same way, it would improve the end-user experience greatly.

I'm liking the thumbnails solution above the more I think about it - it reduces bandwidth on the server side, and it reduces download overhead for the enduser too. Otherwise a usage example would be say 20 series x 3 fan art x 600k each ~= 36mb!! With thumbnails that would be reduced to similar sizes as banners with the full resolution fanart only downloaded "on-demand".

[Bobb25]

Originally Posted by scythelt

Image weight is a concern no doubt. It would increase bandwidth a fair bit. Incidentally, is there a donation program for thetvseries to support a possible bandwidth increase?

Keep in mind the fan art should only have to be downloaded once - it would be nice if the tvseries plugin should be smart enough to check when a user requests an online refresh, whether an image has changed. If it hasn't, skip redownloading it - yet still download new or updated art.

An alternative is to automatically generated thumbnails on upload of fanart, and then the tvseries config displays a "browse fanart for this series" displaying the thumbnails. The user would then select the fanart they like, which then downloads and is assigned to a series. That would mean all backgrounds for all series aren't automatically downloaded - only a specific one on request of the user.

It just seems a shame to me that all this great fanart has to be manually added while one of the great strengths of the tvseries plugin is that the banners/coverart are so nicely integrated and accessible via thetvdb online database. If we could come up with a solution to make fanart available in the same way, it would improve the end-user experience greatly.

I'm liking the thumbnails solution above the more I think about it - it reduces bandwidth on the server side, and it reduces download overhead for the enduser too. Otherwise a usage example would be say 20 series x 3 fan art x 600k each ~= 36mb!! With thumbnails that would be reduced to similar sizes as banners with the full resolution fanart only downloaded "on-demand".

I like the thumbnail suggestion, however my issue would be that i have about 150 series on my HTPC, so at the moment when i do a database refresh, as it is it takes a good coupla hours. Fortunately the only intervention from me is when the File name does not exactly match the online and i have to choose an option, which i have mostly resolved by renaming my series to suit. If it downloaded thumbnails for ALL series and popped up during the process... that would take a huge chunk of time... of course, i suppose i could always untick the option to download Fanart and do it the old fashioned way like i am now

[nylonhof]

Inker,

will you collect all these fan arts and create a new complete download pack for all?

Thanks
nylonhof

[Inker]

I'm trying to figure out how to handle this the best....

The packs will get quite large and with each update/addition if everything is in one pack users will have to download everything all over. But if we do additional packs then useres will have to download 10 different packs......

Suggestions?

[G.B. Wolf]

The best solution would be that every user only downloads the images he really needs. So... if we ignore TheTVDB.com for a moment a solution would be a dedicated website where user can select the images they need from a list (with thumbs) and only download these. In addition there could be an upload function.


PS: This would have the advantage that the data wouldn't be wiped with a database cleanup.

[Sh4nn0w]

Originally Posted by mcbelly

Actually, how does one edit attachements ?

User CP > Micellaneous > Attachments or click here

Oh and thanks for some 4:3 ones to play around with