About the X-Factor Skin (R479) (11 Viewers)

[jinxy_tj]

Hi, I have just installed this skin and am very impressed with it!!

I have changed from the streamed MP skin, and have noticed some fixes which were not present in the latest streamed MP skin fils (artist info for one).

I have just one thing I am wondering about. I found reference to music artwork earlier, and have some additional questions about it. I am currently only able to view the standard music background, no madonna etc, even tho I have manually added these to the appropriate destination. Streamed MP changed the album pic to cycle through the coverart of the album, and then artist art. The location of these are in the Team mediaportal application data thumbs, artist. This would be very useful especially for those of us using a centralised database. Also MediaPortal automatically downloads this info and places it in that location, with the artists name exactly as required. This would save a massive amount of effort trying to manually add each artist in the x factors skin file. If someone can point me in the right direction I may be able to implement this myself, although I am not a professional.

 

[ysmp]

Hi, I have just installed this skin and am very impressed with it!!

I have changed from the streamed MP skin, and have noticed some fixes which were not present in the latest streamed MP skin fils (artist info for one).

I have just one thing I am wondering about. I found reference to music artwork earlier, and have some additional questions about it. I am currently only able to view the standard music background, no madonna etc, even tho I have manually added these to the appropriate destination. Streamed MP changed the album pic to cycle through the coverart of the album, and then artist art. The location of these are in the Team mediaportal application data thumbs, artist. This would be very useful especially for those of us using a centralised database. Also MediaPortal automatically downloads this info and places it in that location, with the artists name exactly as required. This would save a massive amount of effort trying to manually add each artist in the x factors skin file. If someone can point me in the right direction I may be able to implement this myself, although I am not a professional.

i will also like to know how to implamnt it ... if some one can help ....

 

[jinxy_tj]

Hi people,

I have managed to rewrite a small part of the file to use the music album art that media portal downloads. This method is automatic, thus no need to download each and every album. Media portal also downloads artist art, for which this will cycle through the album cover and one of the artists arts. One slight problem I have just found is that the album artist not always of a good enough quality to display very nicely, I have only found one on my system so far that has displayed like this, maybe I can download a better quality replacement for that album, so I will need your feedback on this. The other inaccuracy I have at the moment is weather I should stretch the image to a full wide screen, or compress it to keep it in better proportion. Again the stored image quality makes a difference to this, but all the covers I have are square, so they look a little wider when stretched to fit the whole screen lol.

I will post up my modified file this evening, I will play around a little more and see what I can do.

If anyone knows of a plugin or piece of software which would download cover art, maybe that could be used to specify more specific size artwork and allow a much nicer image at full screen.

Let me know if anyone has any ideas

 

[Imokles]

Hello to all, I have a problem with X-factor r340

I use Mediaportal 1.0.2 on W7 x64, Blue skin works perfect

When I install fonts and skin, and set Use basichome, I enter to X-factor skin and choose Movies, but dont enter to any submenu, back to home

Music menu, plugins, TV and photos works fine, but Movies dont do anything!

Any solution?

best regards!

The "Movies" entry links to the "Moving Pictures" plugin (you can find and download it in the "plugins" section of this forum). If you did not install it, the described behaviour will occur.

 

[vidmartx]

Perfect! Thanks a lot, but now I have 2 problems more...

I have large fonts on w7 and I think for this the text on skins are incorrect =>





And it is possible change the scrapper for filmaffinity.es (spanish), this scrapper is supporter by mediaportal configuration



thanks a lot!

 

[ixdvc]

If anyone knows of a plugin or piece of software which would download cover art, maybe that could be used to specify more specific size artwork and allow a much nicer image at full screen.

Let me know if anyone has any ideas

I use Album Art Downloader for downloading covers. It works great and I think Album Art Exchange has the best quality.

Btw: I think posting links with different text in this forum is really hard. How can you use html-code for links?

 

[jinxy_tj]

Hi, as promised I will provide the file needed to display album and artist images as the background. It will cycle from the album art cover to the artist cover approx every 25secs. As I mentioned earlier, the files are downloaded automatically by media portal. This means they can be of poor resolution, and in the least are not the correct size for large wide screen viewing. Here are some screenshots of what they really look like:

cycles after 25secs to:

Thats one of the worse ones I have!!!

Changes to :

Then back to above after another 25 secs.

I then decided to manually download a replacement for the last image, replacing it with this which is the correct size and resolution:

.


All the above images are stored in the application data of Media Portal. It makes things much easier if you have a centralised database. If I can find a good piece of software to download better quality images I will let you all know. The images really need to be Fanarts rather than just album arts, you can see above the differences.

Here is the file which needs to be copied and paste in

Crogram files/Team MediaPortal/MediaPortal/skin/xfactor.

View attachment MyMusicPlayingNow.xml

For safety sake please rename the existing file .bak at the end in case of any faliure.

 

[Ticiano]

Very good, jinxy_tj!

Do you think it's possible to "auto-crop" the square images to look with the proper aspect in that wide space?

 

[jinxy_tj]

Do you think it's possible to "auto-crop" the square images to look with the proper aspect in that wide space?

I could easily crop all the images to square, and place them in the middle of the screen, downside is two black lines down either side. This is where I need the feedback for preferences. Can easily modify ad post another mod tomoz with it cropped but you would then be limited to the square art, as a wide image would then be reduced to fit in the designated side. Let me know what you prefer.

In thought, if you was to only use album art that would be fine, Thoughts lol...........

 

[Ticiano]

Now I can't say for sure what I really preffer... By one side, we get the images deformed, by the other side, we get black borders... It would be great if the whole universe had a padronized aspect ratio, from the human eye to that chinese webcams.