yep, admitadly the only practical application, I can think of is for debugging
Joey - love your theme - simple, concise and relevant. Is your theme for use by the general population and if so, where do I go to get it (you can tell I am an absolute beginner) and a tutorial on installing it. Any help would be received with gratitude. I have managed to install the Mojo package on my SMP.
Hi TW
Just wondering how you achieved the ghosted backdrop image (1080x720)… is this part of the moviesheet or just rv_gallery view?
Hey Joey… Full Circle…? hmm :wink:
Plus also a little bump for this post by KAD79 (excellent find, by the way) as it may have crept in under the radar for some people…myself included.
thanks again guys,
but I do feels like I’m being given too much credit
I’m just applying a bit of WDLXTV knowledge to this device
I think it was recliq that originally found this method on the original WD Live
I’m just testing and applying it here
and I’m certainly very happy to see what’s being done by the themer’s here
oh and ps. again anybody who wants this on the SMP should vote for this idea
http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming-Ideas/Run-custom-theme-from-thumbdrive/idi-p/502876
if this does not happen, these improvements will be largely WD Hub only
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architectonic wrote:
Hi TW
Just wondering how you achieved the ghosted backdrop image (1080x720)… is this part of the moviesheet or just rv_gallery view?
Right now it’s part of the moviesheet, but I’m trying some different things to increase speed. Speed it pretty decent now, except for Preview view but that’s due to the video running, and I’m sure that I can squeeze a little more speed out of it.
Thanks KAD79 for your finding and your great idea - I hope a lot of people will vote or it and it will get implemented soon !
best find ever! Thanx!
Well here’s a side benefit I just discovered for the linksheet mod…don’t know if I can adequately explain this or not but I’ll try.
This involves PlayOn so you must be running it and using your Hub to access the PlayOn server.
You know all those folder genre covers you made, Action, Animation etc… They show up in PlayOn too! So if you have a script like Ice Films and inside Ice Films there is an option to view movies listed by genre when you go in the genre list, VIOLA! The same sheet you have for your Action folder on your hub will show as the sheet for the Action folder for ANY SCRIPT! I’m sure it’s because VIRTUAL folders are created for all these genres in the scripts.
But wait friends and neighbors it gets better than this! You can create a folder sheet for every script, if it’s written in .LUA code! Sheet titles are CASE SENSITIVE!
A long time ago I made a very simple .LUA script for my PlayOn that just acts as a divider between scripts so I could organize them a little better by Movie scripts then in TV scripts and so on…I titled them
==== MOVIES ====
Soco Films
Movie Madness
VeeHD
==== TV SHOWS ====
TV Land
anyway maybe you get the idea. Well i just made folder sheets for each of those! They work! This is way cooler than I thought it would be!
Thanks again for finding this!!!
And now a screen shot!
cool
so I’m reviving this thread, well, just because this next idea, I don’t think is worthy a thread of it’s own
I’m wondering if anybody has tried this in list view
<image x="0" y="0" w="1280" h="720" image="@@browse_0_thumbnail" speed="1" delay="2" bg="1"/>
an entry would need to be listed for each list view item
and the sheet would get named .jpg
these images get cashed to .wdtv
so changing images will require deleting the .wdtv folder
but doing this would allow list view sheets, immediately displayed
examples might be
This would probably be too narrow minded to create a whole theme around it, but it is possible
what you can’t do is have this and have a different image for thumbnails
I still have a few other idea’s, if I find anything else, I’ll let you know
It’s been done before … also limiting is the “List View” is Shared Between Video / Music / Photos
So, it’s gonna screw up those views as well
Personally, “Linksheets” are still the way to go 
shared, that would definetely be a pain
sort of figured it was too, easy and had probably been done before
Yes, “List View” being shared is a pain. (they were separate XML’s back in the OLD Gen & Gen1 days)
My “Workaround” is to leave “List View” alone …(rv_list_browse_page.xml) Just, standard Poster Thumbnails for that
View. (So, standard images for Music ID3 tags will display as per normal … no sheets required)
The View i posted previously … below is “Large Grid View” … (rv_large_video_browse_page.xml) modified to look like a “List View” … this View is Unique to Video Only and does not effect Music or Photo Views.
You know the hidden .wdtv folder where the WDTV SMP software puts all its images?
Well… we can put our own images in there…
For WD not to overwrite these images, they must have the same mod date as the item they represent.
I changed rv_gallery_browse_page.xml in Mochi to remove lots of cruft and add the crucial line
<image image="@@poster" x="0" y="0" w="1280" h="720" align="hcenter" scale_type="fixratio" scale="100"/>
For Movie “Movies/1408.avi”, the WDTV will attempt to load
.wdtv/thumb/Movies/1408.avi.thumb_1280x720
If the above file has the same mod date as the original movie file (Movies/1408.mkv), then the WDTV SMP software will use that image. If not, the WDTV software will attempt to scale up the Movies/1408.metathumb file - a jpeg of a dvd cover - and the results will not be pretty.
But: we can get the WDTV to load a 1280x720 image without worrying about the 30MB theme space.
I run the WDTV with Library Mode turned off and I put everything on the disk manually (well, I have a bunch of cygwin bash scripts to do all this - copying a subset of movies from my main xbmc server to an external 2.5" HD so I can take the HD and the WDTV on holiday 
LStar337’s Split-Sheet stuff as that 1280x720 image looks quite good and is nice and quick.
If anyone wants, I can share the scripts - be warned, they’re a bit klunky and rely on my existing xbmc layout. and make use of other programs to convert xbmc .nfo files to WD-suitable .xml files. Things are further complicated by the fact that my WDTV is going on holiday with SWMBO and the kids so I can’t do any testing 'til they’re back… so you’d be on your own
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so if I’m understanding you correctly
this will allow the WD to use the backdrop sheet
and keep the normal thumbnail as well
which is exactly what we’re looking for
the only other issue, I see here is that the method must not be too complex
for the same reason I am not telling people how to get telnet access and symlink files
I would imagine a cygwin script will be a nightmare to try and support users
that don’t understand what they are doing
but this is certainly interesting, I’ll may give it a go, just to test it out
and actually, I’ve got another idea
I haven’t tried yet, we’ll see it it leads to anything usefull
Exactly. I tried to use the WDTV’s Library mode but the results were bad. Very bad.
Since I already have all my media with posters etc on a NAS in XBMC format (I use Ember as a media manager), I “just” needed to cobble together a few scripts and some C programs to massage XBMC .nfo to WDTV .xml files (for both TV series and Movies) and sort out the movie sheets with ThumbGen. What I have now, after a couple of months of hacking, is suitable for me and my setup, and will not work without mods for others. I wouldn’t even try to support the scripts …
I made a half-hearted attempt at doing Movies Sets, but it’s a bit messy. I really need to work on genres too.
touch - -reference does the trick! :-)
I’ve been trying to do something like this based on what JoeySmyth did using a png image file to have a thumb and a sheet as a part of a single image. In his case I believe he used a png image renamed to .jpg to have a sheet & thumb. Renaming a png to jpg I don’t believe this is possible any longer. You could use a large jpg with the these items on it just without transparency.
What I’ve tried so far is to have a thumb in between two background images without any gaps. The total image size is 1266x300 (Two backgrounds @ 533x300 + a thumb @ 200x300). Initially this worked pretty well but is now causing me some problems that I’m trying to sort out. For example, if you have the movie “The Avengers”, you could generate a “thumb” like this:
The thumb or background could be selected based on where you are looking on the image…
<!–backdrop_thumb–>
<wrapper x=“100” y=“80” w=“533” h=“300” scale=“1” selected_scale=“100” align=“top,left” scale_type=“pan”>
<image name=“th0” image=“@@browse_0_thumbnail” default_image=“@@default_thumbnail_0” active=“@@act-browselist-0”/>
…would provide a background image and
<!–thumbnail–>
<wrapper y=“389” w=“190” h=“281” scale=“80” selected_scale=“100” align=“vcenter, hcenter” scale_type=“pan”>
<image name=“th0” image=“@@browse_0_thumbnail” default_image=“@@default_thumbnail_0” x=“15” active=“@@act-browselist-0”/>
…would provide the thumb. My hope/thought was to use this single image for the the thumb and backgrounds for a video & then use your linksheet idea for movie information in a png format. Dropping the image component from the png image greatly reduces the file size - 60kB for me for a sheet based on the brightly dark thumbgen template w/o the background image.
here’s what I will be testing out in the next couple of days
I’m currious as to what variables can be used for active=“@@act-browselist-0”
getting either an absolute or relative path to sheets stored elsewhere, example thumbdrive
is no problem at all
so the question is are we able to activeate/deactivate using different variables
if it works, one would just create a single xml file which points to all sheets
the line might look something like
<image image="/path/to/sheet.jpg" default_image="./blankfile" active="@@browse_text"/>
then we would just need a tool to generate an xml
Xaph0d wrote:
You know the hidden .wdtv folder where the WDTV SMP software puts all its images?
Well… we can put our own images in there…
For WD not to overwrite these images, they must have the same mod date as the item they represent.
I changed rv_gallery_browse_page.xml in Mochi to remove lots of cruft and add the crucial line
For Movie “Movies/1408.avi”, the WDTV will attempt to load
.wdtv/thumb/Movies/1408.avi.thumb_1280x720
Well, here’s one problem with that, the SMP doesn’t cache to the the .wd_tv/thumb folder for a NAS. Nor does create the thumb folder or even look for it.
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