Best NON-THUMBGEN Theme?

Hi there,

I’ve tried searching the forums here but I couldnt find any recent themes that did not involve creating Thumbgen generated moviesheets. I know this forum is for HUB but SMP didnt have a theme section.

A little background - I’ve recently upgraded from a 2nd Gen WDTV HD to a SMP and am satisfied enough with the scraping it is doing. Yes, the images are sort of sucky, but to be honest I’d rather live with that then continually use thumbgen each time I add a movie or tv show. Yes it only takes a few minutes to create the moviesheets, but I’ve spent countless hours organizing, renaming, and creating the thumbgen files for the 2nd Gen WDTV and the idea of converting them to a different theme for the SMP is making me lose my hair. I was using wdlxtv and the Pintas999 templates which worked great, but I sadly only outputed the *_sheet.jpg files and not the metadata or xml… I’m almost postive I would essentially have to redo my 2TB collection of tv shows and movies to switch themes… right?

All that being said, is there a good theme that I can simply use the SMP scrapper with? I know Black Mamba based themes need thumbgen, but my understanding is that Mojo-based ones do not. However looking at the new Mojo version for SMP it needs Thumbgen files now. Are there other themes that DO NOT need thumbgen files?

Thank you very much!!! Sorry if I’m missing any important details but I’ll happily provide if needed!

Best,

Tom

I think the best option you have is to try them out

most themes are created with the idea that you will use a specific temlate to make things look correct

however that said, if you’ve used the internal scraper

you can load any theme without running thumbgen and see if it looks ok to you

I’m thinking something like mojo would probably be good, because instead of imbedding the text into the background sheet

it still reads and displays the xml data

other themes don’t read the xml data and rely on the info to be burned into the jpg in thumbgen

Thanks. I think you’re right. I was going to take a stab at Mojo anyways to see what happened. I just set the SMP up and am now letting it index/scrap everything (which is its doing with great sucess since everything is already organized). I’ll install Mojo and report back and see how it looks.

In regards to Thumbgen now - since the xml has been created by the SMP scrapper, can’t I just force Thumbgen to read from the xml and then auto-mode everything with a new theme? My main concern was to go through each one movie/series and resolve any conflicts it found (i.e. I’d have to babysit it), but with the xml it should be a 1:1 generation given a specifc template, yes?

Thanks!

There are plenty of good SMP themes in the Live Streaming Discussions section.

One i love and looks great plus works well is Surreal Media Center 2.2 SMP.

 

I remember using the scraper with it and it worked well.

Give it a try if you have not. IMO it’s the best overall theme for the SMP.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming-Discussions/Surreal-Media-Center-2-2-SMP-Theme-Update/td-p/397943

Best of luck!