Thumbgen bundles

WD Legacy Products WD TV Themes
1

Based on my experience gathered by listening many people have the desire to tune their device with a theme and moviesheets but have not many computer skills nor an interest to develop them. For those people bundles are perfect. What Joey and TW are trying to convince you about is that you have to learn all this stuff so you can have nice movie sheets. People have life’s, family’s, real problem’s… they want to kick back and watch a movie and if they can have a movie sheets it’s even better. Why forcefully ignoring a feature that provides a 1 click solution instead of offering both methods? Why forcing someone to learn something when the technology is there free to use to provide and 1second  installation for something that can take you weeks? It’s like Microsoft telling you to install windows folder by folder so you can learn the functionality better.

I always thought themers are in it together, ought to support the community and provide solutions.
Instead it is this constant backstabbing while smiling in your face… I have no problem with that but now it is on expense of the community and the attempt to kill something useful.

If you ever wondered why WD doesn’t listen to themers you have the reasons now. There is NO appeal to the mainstream. (old firmware versions, hardcore setup, no manuals) Instead of finding ways to find a common denominator and appeal to a broader audience in order for the talking points to gain more power and reason you are fighting down a solution my grandmother could accomplish and you are trying to MANIPULATE people into thinking that it was a bad thing. That is insane!!!

Fact is…

the easier the solution the more users are generated

the more users you generate the more the community grows

the more community grows the more leverage for changes in your favor.

all that shall be ignored and now go back like a good sheeple and learn to do it the hard way based on a manual that doesn’t exist.

Maybe i stay on here just to spite you guys :smileyvery-happy:

2 Likes
2

Dev

A couple of things…

Bundles


I agree with you that the simpler you make it the more people will use it. I downloaded your bundle just to use TWs theme. Why ? Well although I had used TG a good few times, I could not remember where to put his reflective movie cover in the sheet setup. Ironically I could not get yours to create the jpgs for the moviesheets, as the line you entered to create in another folder did not work for me, until I directed it to the correct place.

I also think you and even I think it’s a lot easier than it is once you have the Sheets ready to go. TG is an amzing application, but I know from the last few days that sorting out TV series can be a right pain. If I did not use Renamer and work out how to name certain specials for shows like Battlestar Galacttica, I would never have got it done, not that the in built scraper was any good for that either. But having to maually edit lots of episodes for it to look at the right place in TVDB, or having to maually use F1/F2 to mix the pictures up for the sheets, or pick TV Show covers that did not have DVD on the cover, goes away from the 1 click wonderland you talk about, this leads me to the paragraph at WD as really what company would support that.

Reality check

 

I do find your comments overall to be quite strange though. You talk about community, but you dropped your last theme like a hot potato and made a big deal with a signature saying not taking part in the community. But you kept popping up and eventually have come back. So you cant make out you are a big team player, and everyone is making things hard, when you had the Theme breakdown yourself. :slight_smile:

I also don’t think you can relate any of this as to why WD are not doing anything with themes. You think back to the beginning when people were just tweaking the default ones, they were not interested then, so do you really think they would come out with official support for something that neither uses a scraper/backdrops that they have built the default themes around.

So maybe you need to step back and think what a lot of us did, me I thought you had a point, but it was a definitive Diva moment, if you had stayed through it and came out with this you may have had a case, but they way you stormed off, but then come back and start a basic troll post, well it does not wash with me Im afraid.

3

good points WDTV and thanx for sahring your opinion… and you are right, I stormed off and and I am not a real part of this community but I am not manipulating people out of spite and that is my whole point and it is far away from being a troll post. People deserve easy solutions and when such a solution is created and you ignore it and tell people “you gotta learn first” that pretty much makes a silly point.

You can do it the easy way… do it and stop arguing that the harder way is better because it is not. You even learn better when you know which settings to disregard and which not. The argument was started for whole other reasons and I am doing this post to make sure people know that they are used and manipulated in a battle based on ego issues.

I am a Diva and I am proud of it and I did the right thing when I took down my theme at this point because things been destroyed. If we hadn’t made a fuss about it do you think they had changed it all back? They did.

What you said about “believing” WD will never come the themers way… that’s a matter of opinions i guess. If you nobody makes the step towards the other party first we will never know for sure but what we know for sure is that the common denominator must be marketable and reasonable. You cannot make a point by having a theme working with a 2 years old firmware (nothing wrong with that theme it is awesome, no offense) you cannot appeal to the WD people if the knowledge exceeds very limited understanding for computers. So the trend should go to a completely dumbed down version of everything, starting from automatic installers of the theme and a movie sheet generation interface where people not necessarily need to know what they are doing. If you got that you got a point you can sell. We did that on the platform I am working for right now and you end up with 2 sets of moviesheets one of them is based on  templates I created that work with the build in scraper. Scraper has an auto function and an expert function where you can select the images yourself. Now that would be something WD would be interested in when they could get the quality of ThumbGen into their scraper and make it variable etc… I know I would love it :slight_smile:

The Hot Potato was already downloaded 400 times and people seem to have so little problems with it that the thread is nearly dead. So was my mamba 1.9 update… it was just that easy and there were 5,000 downloads for that theme and only a handful of people had some question which were not functionality related. I think that makes a point for itself.

The real reality check is…

I didn’t put this in my signature to start the most dumb argument in the history of this board. If they provoke a discussion and mean to gang up on something and try to manipulate out of pure personal reasons I think this community should know and that is regardless that I am a steady member here or not. My contributions speak for themselves and as much as I appreciate honesty I don’t need to be told what I can say and not say because like my contribution my points speak for themselves. It’s easier = It’s better

Diva Post End :slight_smile:

4

Some good points yourself…

Troll Mode on/

I am not as young as I used to be, and I think you are. If I could describe how you are acting, it would be a young person who has learnt a lot from other themers, has reached the same level if not surpassed it, but are being disrespectful to the others that have passed on the knowledge by saying they are dinosaurs. Its world wide, I am in engineering Subsea, but was in the Air Force for many years, and the same attitude exists everywhere. You really don’t need to mention them, you could have made the same post highlighting it, just from your existence in this board alone, all you will do is create animosity and this helps no one in a community.

Troll Mode off/

But back to the task in hand, Dev, WD cannot even let me have multiple shares in the same folder, icons for the internal drive/connected external drives, organise TV episodes correctly…etc etc…

Why on earth do you think they would suddenly jump on board now after another glitch? has been found, and using a third party app as well. They will quite happily be sitting back saying, you crack on, because for a start they can’t and won’t hang about the forum supporting it, and as we all know the people who fix the firmware don’t even have a Hub, or they would know they would be breaking it every time. :slight_smile:

5

now you are even making excellent points in your troll mode.

I am 30 yo therefore not too young but very accomplished for my age.

It might sound disrespectful what I am saying but what it really is is a response to the provocation and those 2 even had to gang up. I would never post internals from PM’s but I know exactly what they have been talking. For that matter I have extremely good reasons to point it out because I did not start the offense. It is against ThumbGen and it is against me and it is the community that will suffer. I think both of them are really nice guys, supportive and all and I did thank them hundreds of times and even defended one of them when everyone was stabbing at him. I understand this nonsense argument as an attack and I answer with what is morally okay to do in such a situation. I did not start it and if I wanted to be mean I could be but this is not the point. I did not spend all this time here and leave the board with no development and progress. If that’s the case i stay and pump out a new theme that is so automated that even a Zombie could use it…

See you were right on the money with the Diva stuff…

now about the non troll part… 1 year ago i didn’t even know how to create a movie sheet, today I get paid for creating them… everything is possible but when one is not attempting to find common ground one will not find it.

6

Not to mention that after nearly 3 years the Hub is nearing the end as a usefull product, it’s outdated. One that in ~3 years has still not been fixed by it’s firmware revisions which, at best, are bandaids.

7

Thumbgen has become a very nice application the create moviesheets, linksheet, folder covers and folder sheet.  The addition of bundle created with the colaboration of Thumbgen and Dev was a welcome improvement.  It definitly make the use of Thumbgen a breeze.   The fact that some themers will chose not  to include bundles with their themes surprise me.  I can create profiles easily but other might find this task somewhat difficult.  Testing profiles prior to using them to create sheets for a few hundred movie can be time consuming and sometime frustrating.

I hope that when WD decide to retire the Live hub, they will offer a fw which will be fully open so that fw coders may be able to modify it.  I understand this will most likely mean the lost of some or all services that can be access from the box.  Not a big deal for me since I dont use any.

8

DreamingMode.On

First use (that’s valid for all): start TG, configure settings (movie folders, preferred collectors, etc), install preferred bundles, done

For “normal people”: start TG, click “Process new movies (auto)”, get a popup from time to time to confirm a movie and at the end you minimize TG as it generates all the sheets in the background

For maniacs: start TG, click “Process new movies (manual)”, get a “moviesheet generator” with lots of covers, fanarts, a “wysiwyg” moviesheets preview and possibility to generate “n” sheets at once.

For kids: start your HTPC/mediaplayer/whatever-device-connected-to-internet and click “Show Info” on a new movie, you get a “Please wait” for about 2-3 seconds (only once/movie of course) and tadaa your moviesheet is ready and u can see/read it :slight_smile:

DreamingMode.Off

I guess we should not take those sheets, themes, covers, firmwares, devices, companies too serious… they just come and go after some weeks/months/years… it’s definitely not worth arguing about them :slight_smile:

9

Okay, I’m going to chime in here as an end-user and not a coder or theme producer. I was very happy with the bundle that was included with BM 1.9 and think it was a great step foreward in using TG. Prior to bundles, I used Dev’s instruction sheet and it all worked out great, but just added a bit of time, and as I have installed TG on multiple machines, several times each due to various changes in my OS etc, I kept going back to the manual and walking through the steps. Of course, 'to err is human", and on several occasions I had missed something, and then had to go back and trouble shoot the issue. With the bundle, I have installed it several times and it was quick and painless.

I see it as an advantage, but not a deal breaker to not have. I would think anything that makes installing and setting up a theme easier is a good thing, and will hopefuly inspire more people to use the theme. As it sits now, this is still a complicated process, and if you have little to no computer experience, I cannot imagine getting this stuff to work. Bundles or no bundles, installing a theme and getting all your movies and TV shows set up can be painful depending on what type fo movies yo have. I have spent innumerable hours getting my HUB to look and feel the way I want it to, and that’s with you guys/gals doing all the hard work first. The dream of a one click install and go is no reality on this platform, so anything a developer can do to make it easier to use their work seems like a good thing to me.

I have found TG to be excellent 80% of the time. The other 20% I have found that either my TV show cannot be found under the TV setup but under the movie setup,or I have to rename the files, and in some cases simply make my own sheets completely. Now with the link sheets, I spent a great deal of time making folder sheets for my genres, making new folder icons as I have a lot of sub genres etc. This takes a lot of work and it is well worth it. But as above, if you can make any of it easier for us endusers, the better off we all are. I was determined to get this stuff working and spent the better part of the last two weeks building my link sheets for 800+ movies, many older and foreign ones that needed to be manualy made due to lack of fan art or details. I can see how a person could get very frustrated very quickly and just give up. If the bundle helps that person at least get to start making their sheets without trying to t-shoot why they are not coming out at all, a small part of the battle has been won, and thats less questions on the board and on PMs about sytax errors when setting up TG.

So after that long rambling and mostly worthless post, in short, if you can make any part of the process easier, it’s a mighty good thing and may keep a person from giving up on the process before they have even made their first sheet. Once you see one good sheet on you own box working, that’s the insentive to push on and get the rest of your movies and TV shows done.

-P

-P

10

i think what is often forgotten are the people that use a theme / want to use a theme and don’t post here, don’t even have an account. I don’t want to ignore them nor do I want to force them to signup just to ask a question. If things would be so easy I wouldn’t have had 100 pages of Q&A (is that 1000 posts) about ThumbGen settings. Half of the questions been from long time users, with the introduction of Bundles all the questions disappeared instantly.

Really smart people are usually the worst teachers because they can’t imagine how someone thinks who has no knowledge at all and this forum is a very good example for that.

If you don’t provide a solution to solve a problem - you are the problem!

An argument is started by signing it under every single post with their signature, they would not engage in the argument they actively started because the argument is weak and they know it. It is based on personal reasons and the community is the ball in their game and as much as I shouldn’t care about that I do care because whenever things are getting unfair I raise my voice, I did it to defend both of them and I do it to point it out. That’s fair on my part and I know for a fact they cannot say the same about themselves.