Gallery Moviesheet/Thumbnail Trick

WD Legacy Products WD TV Themes
21

Sounds interesting Tinwarble, but i cant see any of the pictures you posted ? (maybe there is a delay)

Maybe try a different image host .  I use  Tinypic , images appear here on the forum instantly.

Did a little ‘Demo’ package of this ‘Experiment’  … will upload it with the next hour or so. (dinner time,bit of tv 1st)

:slight_smile:

22

Yeah, I usually post at Flickr.  The pics here have to be approved by a mod before they will appear.

You can see the first HERE

The second HERE.

But I assume that this is similar to the method that you are using.  And I was just trying to explain to the other poster how it worked.

And by the way, great work!

23

Now thats what happens when people put ideas togeather…

This idea makes a lot of sense going forward…

ie you could have different themes that use the thumbnail part of the moviesheet at the bottom…

My only concern would be that of compatibilty with the wd live and live plus, and as i am a neatness freak when it comes to organising my folders it would be very hard for me to go down the route of all my movies in the same folder.

But visually this is so tempting that it makes my decision difficult :smileyvery-happy:

24

Just so you know, though, my explaination might have been over simplified, I was just try to explain the process of  Joey’s trick worked, that basically it was displaying the Cover art in the Moviesheet as the Thumbnail.

I’m also working on a way to display the Moviesheet and the Thumbnail that uses the dummy file method, but hides the dummy file thumbnail and displays the moviesheet and will scroll normally.   I’m still trying to work some things out in my head (which is hard to do with the all the noise from the rocks rattling around), and it may be to complicated to actually implement.

25

that looks good,

so where do i go? and how do i do that?

the scale stuff lol

26

Ok, so here is a Demo of what i posted on Page (1)

I Cannot stress enough, that this is “Experimental”  

This means… i stripped the Gallery Code down to the basics to try to achieve what i wanted.

Once i found it worked… then the process of “reinstating” code that i deleted will begin.

eg.‘watched’ ‘favourites’ etc.

NOTE: I disabled the “Quick Thumbnail Scroll Effect” when you reach the end/beginning of your movies… looked terrible… thumbnail would “POP OUT” for a second before returning to normal… not happy… disabled it.

If you understand that, this,  is a “work in progress and not finished, but would like to check it so far”…

http://hotfile.com/dl/110455482/1970247/Experiment.rar.html

then the password is :  agree

Experiment.rar     contains the following…

GalleryExTheme   (copy this to your .wdtv/theme )

Movies Demo   (copy this to anywhere… eg Internal Storage  etc)

Thumbgen Template Hub Gallery (copy this to your Thumbgen/Templates dir.)

And make sure your WDTV LIVE HUB in settings is in 'Media Library" mode.

27

Hi Joey…

Downloading now to test out… Thanks for this

Tinwarble lets get a bulldozer to clear those rocks away…i need this working with the dummy file method LOL…

28

Great work Joey…

Works really well…

I notice that you had a nice trick of using a ‘blank’ Movies Demo.xml…

All the xml’s job is there to trigger the moviename.jpg hence the moviesheet shows very clever…

I think this confirms my theory that if you remove the backdrops then the speed of gallery view increases.

29

oh man! I just tried it

That’s an amazing experience, so neet and fluid.

hmm… i just modified some codes to make it display 1280x720 sheets…

Well, it works well with all movies in  individual folders.

but there’s about 3 second delay when all movies are placed in the same folder…

30

yeah 1280x720 was not good

so, are you saying 1280x720 is ‘quicker’ if movies are in individual folders ?

which is a ‘double-click’   to start playing a movie ?

Oh well… at the end of the day it’s still just an ‘Experiment’

Thanks for the feedback guys :slight_smile:

31

yes they are quicker to display in individual folders!

hmm,  i think i will try to renable the backdrops

and reduce the resolution of my moviesheets and see…

if the delay is the same or not.

32

If the files are in individual folders then 1280x720 moviesheets will be instant, however you will not have anything on the top folder very much like our current moviesheet themes…

So you will need to enter the folder for the sheet to display…

I wish there was a way to get an image for the folder view…so far the only thumbnail i have been able to bring up is the folder.jpg for the top level which as we know gets distorted if its streched too much

However i might still look at doing this as i really like the aesthetics of your test theme…

Joey, please take your theme all the way this idea is excellent and will be great for people that have all there movies in the same folder

**EDIT*** i made a quick test by moving some your test templates into individual folders and the theme works really well.

However a weird thing happened the thumbnails became unfocused even for the templates that have NOT been moved into indidivual folders…

The issue was the xml must be the EXACT same name as the folder name i had not renamed the xml to the same name as my Movies Demo 2 folder

33

Hi there,

I have tried everything, but the whole  movie sheets thing seems way too complicated for me ! Let me explain my problem :

I have a lot of TV shows on my hub, much more than film (about 1200 episodes and 10 films !) and I really want to use movie sheets instead of having the same thumbnail for all the episodes of the same season. I tried every method listed on this forum, downloaded all the themes that were movie-sheets compatible. I Can imagine myself as a smart person, but there is no way I can make this work !

When I saw Joeysmyth’s method today, I thought I had understood everything but it all went wrong once again. Here is what I have :

  • First, I downloaded the Ewperiment.rar file. I unzipped it, put the “GalleryExTheme” folder in the theme folder of my live hub, put the “Movies Demo” folder in my movie folder and switched the live hub on.

  • I worked perfectly. The demo files had perfect moviesheets !

  • Then I put the “Thumbgen Template Hub Gallery” folder in the templates folder of thumbgen and started making moviesheets for the series “Entourage”

  • I generated the movie sheets for the whole season one and went back in front of my TV to see the result. But instead of the thumbnails I had before, I had NO moviesheets. I just could see a very low resolution thumbnail.

  • My first reflex was to think that this was because of the cache of the hub. Therefore I switched it off ant reloaded it. But still the same problem !

  • Then, I decided to test the movie sheets that I generated with the files that actually worked well. So I made a copy of a movie sheet from Entourage season one in the “movie demo” folder provided by JoeySmyth. I deleted Avatar’s moviesheet and changed the name of entourage’s moviesheet into “avatar.jpg”

  • And Guess What : I worked ! Perfectly !

  • Then I decided to make another test : I copyed an episode and its moviesheet in thismagical folder and guess what ? I works !

So why is there a folder in my hub that allows the movie sheets to work perfectly, andonly this one ? Is there something related to the fact that I’m using both a Mac and a PC ? Please, if you have an explaination, please let me know, it would be great !

Thanks for reading this (long) text.

Guillaume.

P.S : As you have certainly noticed, English is not my native language. Actually, I’m french. So if a french speaking member of this forum as a solution for me, please feel free to PM me !

34

Hi gbernard64

i think the answer to your problem lies in my edited post just above you

Basically you will need an xml file it can be a blank text file that you rename that is EXACTLY the same name as the folder

So in your tv show folder make a blank xml file that is called the same as the folder

Eg Entourage folder will have files

Entourage SE01E01.mkv

Entourage SE01E02.mkv

Entourage SE01E03.mkv

Entourage.jpg ----------------------------------> the moviesheet

Entourage.xml ------------------------------------> the xml file

1 Like
35

2 words :

Thank You!

36

awesome osd, looks great, I never used thumbgen before and the process was super easy, thanks for your hard work Mr. Smyth, greatly appreciated.

I keep my movies in the same folder because I want to avoid the extra click

37

I start to adapt the movie sheet for tv episode

with a mix of joeysmith and S1l3nc0r shhet

hope to give you something end of the day :slight_smile:

Edit :

the link for jOEYSMITH alternate template for tv show episode : http://www.4shared.com/file/g-vj-NT3/Thumbgen_Template_Hub_srie.html

I finalize and upgrade it later. I am not at home :wink:

thank you to joeysmith and S1l3nc0r for the design pattern

38

stupid question but here goes, thumbgen outputs my sheet as a png, looks fine , the metadata is displayed fine over the ‘transparent area’, however when I rename it to jpg the metadata area becomes grey, not black…any idea what I’m doing wrong?

thanks

39

Renaming from PNG to JPG allows the sheet to become transparent. (Transparent black will look greyish)

40

so just rename the movie.png to movie.jpg and on the wd hub it’ll look black? ok