(2024-10-02, 23:51)Zing23 Wrote: Hi realcopacetic.  I love the skin!! The look and design is easily my favorite. 

I'm wondering about the poster artwork. In showcase mode the poster artwork looks pixelated. I have poster artwork 2000x3000 pixels but it looks bad. 
I'm guessing it's something to do with Kodi cache system? 
All other artwork looks great, billboards & logos are all crystal clear.

Is there anything I can do to make the poster artwork crystal clear also? 
I'm not sure is it's a skin design or a kodi background setting.
I'm running kodi/Copacetic on android system. 

Any help would be great. And thanks for the skin. Great work!

xml:


<advancedsettings version="1.0">

    <imageres>720</imageres>

    <fanartres>1080</fanartres>

    <imagescalingalgorithm>lanczos</imagescalingalgorithm>

</advancedsettings>

• "Vertical Large" gets you one full row of 5 posters (plus one row of 5 cut off) on the screen at once
  
• "Horizontal" gets you two full rows of 6 posters (12 in total, plus two posters cut off on the side) on the screen at once
  
• "Vertical small gets you 2 full rows of 7 posters (14 in total, plus another row of seven cut off) on the screen at once
  

(2024-10-01, 19:46)realcopacetic Wrote: I wasnt able to figure out why it's not working for you. If I remember you said the Estuary autoclose doesn't work either?

(2024-10-04, 10:33)Aaiemron Wrote:

(2024-10-01, 19:46)realcopacetic Wrote: I wasnt able to figure out why it's not working for you. If I remember you said the Estuary autoclose doesn't work either?

In Estuary it isn't working either for me. It doesn't autoclose.

Some skins have an option to put autoclose on, like Arctic Horizon or Arctic Fuse

(2024-10-03, 14:06)realcopacetic Wrote:

(2024-10-02, 23:51)Zing23 Wrote: Hi realcopacetic.  I love the skin!! The look and design is easily my favorite. 

I'm wondering about the poster artwork. In showcase mode the poster artwork looks pixelated. I have poster artwork 2000x3000 pixels but it looks bad. 
I'm guessing it's something to do with Kodi cache system? 
All other artwork looks great, billboards & logos are all crystal clear.

Is there anything I can do to make the poster artwork crystal clear also? 
I'm not sure is it's a skin design or a kodi background setting.
I'm running kodi/Copacetic on android system. 

Any help would be great. And thanks for the skin. Great work!

thanks glad you're enjoying it!

yeah, by default Kodi caches artwork fairly low res (720px for posters I think). You can change this in advancedsettings.xml. Details here: https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#imageres

If you don't already have this file, it goes in your userdata folder and the bit you need for better quality artwork is this:

xml:


<advancedsettings version="1.0">

    <imageres>720</imageres>

    <fanartres>1080</fanartres>

    <imagescalingalgorithm>lanczos</imagescalingalgorithm>

</advancedsettings>

1) imageres - this is the height of non fanart images, e.g. posters. Default height is 720 and the width is worked out as (16/9) * height. So the default size is 1280 (w) x 720 (h) and it scales the image down until both sizes are within that boundary. So if you have a poster that's 2000x3000, it's going to end up at 480 x 720, hence looking so pixellated.
2) fanartres - this value is the height for 16:9 images. Default is 1080. Width is worked out as (16/9) * height. So the default size is 1920 x 1080. 

Then you can change those numbers to whatever you want, e.g. 

You can set the values as you like. So for 4k, you could set the height of both values to 2160. If you want Kodi not to resize artwork at all, put 9999 then it will just import it as it is.

Couple of important notes:
1) This won't do anything to already cached artwork, so you'll have to clear your cache and rebuild it. You can do this by deleting the file userdata/Database/Textures13.db and also deleting everything in the folder userdata/Thumbnails. Do this while Kodi is closed. Then Kodi will recache all the artwork at the new size when you open it. This will happen in the background and can take a while, you can force it by scrolling through your library so it has to show the artwork and it will load it all in, performance may suffer during this period - once you see the artwork on your screen, it's been cached by Kodi.

2) Potentially a bigger concern, depending on your device, performance can get hit pretty hard with higher quality assets, because Kodi doesn't scale them down. So while it should be fine for a view like Showcase, which is showing a single poster at a time (or 2-3 depending on how you have the view configured), you might start seeing lag in Grid view. This is because Kodi will try and show all of the posters at 2000x3000 at the same time, even though the thumbnails are shrunk down to a very small size. 

3) A smaller consideration, if you use views like grid with smaller artwork, the scaling algorithms used by Kodi aren't the best so your artwork can end up looking overly sharpened when it's shrunk down, although you probably won't notice it too much at a distance. Adding in the <imagescalingalgorithm> line that I have above helps alleviate this a bit by forcing Kodi to use a better scaling algorithm.

For what it's worth I use an Nvidia Shield and my artwork is all 2000x3000 for posters and 3840x2160 for fanarts. All my logos are within a 1600x620 bounding (this is basically double the sort of standard set by fanart.tv - going bigger than this is likely to slow down the cropper that works in the background so you'll see a delay in the logos loading) In my advanced settings, I use 1080 instead of 2160, and it looks ok, especially from the sofa. Performance is solid 60fps on all the views, but Grid can chug a bit sometimes.

One thing you can do to mitigate this is stick with a configuration on grid that has larger items so there's less of them on the screen. As I mentioned in a post above:

• "Vertical Large" gets you one full row of 5 posters (plus one row of 5 cut off) on the screen at once
  
• "Horizontal" gets you two full rows of 6 posters (12 in total, plus two posters cut off on the side) on the screen at once
  
• "Vertical small gets you 2 full rows of 7 posters (14 in total, plus another row of seven cut off) on the screen at once
  

So you'll probably find that with larger artwork, Vertical Large is the most performant Grid layout as it has the fewest items to show at a time. And then switching from poster view to fanart view may also help as it will show fewer fanarts than posters at a time.

One more note - depending on your device, you have to make sure you have the setting enabled in Kodi settings so that the GUI will actually be shown full res. Settings > System > Display - you can set the resolution there that will be used for the GUI (not for video playback) so make sure it's set high enough, otherwise everything will stay low res.

(2024-10-12, 05:25)towerpc Wrote: Excellent. Flawless. The best skin I have seen in years of using Kodi. Simple and clean.

(2024-10-13, 03:55)Zing23 Wrote: I have 2 suggestions:
When you select a movie and it opens to the info screen (below), would it be possible to have the option to show the movie title as a logo/clearlogo.
Instead of the basic font it could be replaced with the logo?

Also in showcase mode it shows poster on left and on right of screen (with options selected) it show movie logo, info & plot summary below.
Would it be possible to ad the movie tagline above the plot summary?
Maybe in a slightly bigger sized font than the plot summary and in a slightly different color, maybe even in Bold.

Just some suggestions, see what you think.

Thanks alot!!

(2024-10-24, 19:52)Mozillion Wrote: I really like the clean skin. I'm coming from Pellucid that does not seem to work on Kodi Omega any more (and has been rather unmaintained for quite a while now).
This skin can also be configured as to be not to complicated for non-technical users such as my parents, great!
I have some feedback/questions/requests, if you'll have them

First, a question: for the home window I'd rather use a custom/global slide show from some folder with preselected images then random images per Home menu item.
I've enabled the "Override home background with global slideshow" in the Home settings, but could not find a way to configure it.
For now, I've set the "multi-background" background setting with the same folder for each Home/Main menu item.
(Improvement nitpick: the Menus settings call it "Home menu",  when you go into it, it is suddenly called the "Main menu".)

When playing music, the fullscreen music playback display hides the OSD after a few seconds. Can this be disabled somehow? When I use this, I do this so I can sometimes glance what is playing, but now I only see an artist-related image and I don't have images for all artists so then it's just a black screen.

When viewing the music playlist view when music is playing, it also shows the embedded music player at the same time, which looks like a weird duplication off the same information.

When playing video, it shows the end time when it starts playing. This is great. Is there a way to see somewhere at a later point? I sometimes want to peek at it so I can decide whether to stop watching.
(I'd rather have this than the remaining time where I have to do the end time calculation myself.)

Finally, when jumping to a time index in a video (by typing in this time index using 0-9 on the remote and then pressing enter), I cannot see what I'm typing! Is this a missing overlay view?

(2024-10-24, 22:56)realcopacetic Wrote:

(2024-10-24, 19:52)Mozillion Wrote: I really like the clean skin. I'm coming from Pellucid that does not seem to work on Kodi Omega any more (and has been rather unmaintained for quite a while now).
This skin can also be configured as to be not to complicated for non-technical users such as my parents, great!
I have some feedback/questions/requests, if you'll have them

First, a question: for the home window I'd rather use a custom/global slide show from some folder with preselected images then random images per Home menu item.
I've enabled the "Override home background with global slideshow" in the Home settings, but could not find a way to configure it.
For now, I've set the "multi-background" background setting with the same folder for each Home/Main menu item.
(Improvement nitpick: the Menus settings call it "Home menu",  when you go into it, it is suddenly called the "Main menu".)

When playing music, the fullscreen music playback display hides the OSD after a few seconds. Can this be disabled somehow? When I use this, I do this so I can sometimes glance what is playing, but now I only see an artist-related image and I don't have images for all artists so then it's just a black screen.

When viewing the music playlist view when music is playing, it also shows the embedded music player at the same time, which looks like a weird duplication off the same information.

When playing video, it shows the end time when it starts playing. This is great. Is there a way to see somewhere at a later point? I sometimes want to peek at it so I can decide whether to stop watching.
(I'd rather have this than the remaining time where I have to do the end time calculation myself.)

Finally, when jumping to a time index in a video (by typing in this time index using 0-9 on the remote and then pressing enter), I cannot see what I'm typing! Is this a missing overlay view?

Thanks for the feedback and the questions/suggestions. Always welcome them!!

1. When enabling the global override, there should be an option if you choose custom to select a folder. I'm pretty sure I set this up but will have to double check and confirm or fix it it's not working properly.
Thanks I love nitpicks, will get that fixed!!

Edited to add: Yes when you go to custom you can choose a custom path, go to the bottom and choose Custom action, then you can type in the path to a folder, e.g. special://profile/backgrounds/ - More info here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=377432

2. This is standard Kodi behaviour, on the music playback screen pressing info acts as an on/off toggle for the information displayed. Either it will show all the time or for the first X seconds of a song. This is to have flexibility of people use visualisations. If your don't have a convenient way of pressing info, I can add a setting to let you set the information overlay to always show

3. The thinking of having the widget is that it gives you direct playback control while your are browsing the playlist. I believe in the default skin, these media controls (play/pause, next, etc) are located in the hidden menu. And if you're browsing through the playlist it should then be useful to see what's actually playing at the same time. That's the theory at least, I've never had much feedback on the music side so a lot of it is just set up as I personally would like it. Open to any thoughts, challenges or ideas on a different way to approach this.

4. Yes makes sense, I'm happy to add this on somewhere. It might be on the fullscreen info that comes up when you press info during playback. It can also be set to display when the video is paused in Copacetic > Settings > Customisations. But I can't remember off the top of my head if it's in there.

5. Oh no idea about this I never tried it. If something's missing I'll see what happens in other skins and update accordingly, thanks for raising it

I'll post these issues on my GitHub later so I don't forget and you can keep track there if you like. Thanks,

https://github.com/realcopacetic/skin.copacetic

(2024-10-25, 21:53)Mozillion Wrote:

(2024-10-24, 22:56)realcopacetic Wrote:

(2024-10-24, 19:52)Mozillion Wrote: I really like the clean skin. I'm coming from Pellucid that does not seem to work on Kodi Omega any more (and has been rather unmaintained for quite a while now).
This skin can also be configured as to be not to complicated for non-technical users such as my parents, great!
I have some feedback/questions/requests, if you'll have them

First, a question: for the home window I'd rather use a custom/global slide show from some folder with preselected images then random images per Home menu item.
I've enabled the "Override home background with global slideshow" in the Home settings, but could not find a way to configure it.
For now, I've set the "multi-background" background setting with the same folder for each Home/Main menu item.
(Improvement nitpick: the Menus settings call it "Home menu",  when you go into it, it is suddenly called the "Main menu".)

When playing music, the fullscreen music playback display hides the OSD after a few seconds. Can this be disabled somehow? When I use this, I do this so I can sometimes glance what is playing, but now I only see an artist-related image and I don't have images for all artists so then it's just a black screen.

When viewing the music playlist view when music is playing, it also shows the embedded music player at the same time, which looks like a weird duplication off the same information.

When playing video, it shows the end time when it starts playing. This is great. Is there a way to see somewhere at a later point? I sometimes want to peek at it so I can decide whether to stop watching.
(I'd rather have this than the remaining time where I have to do the end time calculation myself.)

Finally, when jumping to a time index in a video (by typing in this time index using 0-9 on the remote and then pressing enter), I cannot see what I'm typing! Is this a missing overlay view?

Thanks for the feedback and the questions/suggestions. Always welcome them!!

1. When enabling the global override, there should be an option if you choose custom to select a folder. I'm pretty sure I set this up but will have to double check and confirm or fix it it's not working properly.
Thanks I love nitpicks, will get that fixed!!

Edited to add: Yes when you go to custom you can choose a custom path, go to the bottom and choose Custom action, then you can type in the path to a folder, e.g. special://profile/backgrounds/ - More info here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=377432

2. This is standard Kodi behaviour, on the music playback screen pressing info acts as an on/off toggle for the information displayed. Either it will show all the time or for the first X seconds of a song. This is to have flexibility of people use visualisations. If your don't have a convenient way of pressing info, I can add a setting to let you set the information overlay to always show

3. The thinking of having the widget is that it gives you direct playback control while your are browsing the playlist. I believe in the default skin, these media controls (play/pause, next, etc) are located in the hidden menu. And if you're browsing through the playlist it should then be useful to see what's actually playing at the same time. That's the theory at least, I've never had much feedback on the music side so a lot of it is just set up as I personally would like it. Open to any thoughts, challenges or ideas on a different way to approach this.

4. Yes makes sense, I'm happy to add this on somewhere. It might be on the fullscreen info that comes up when you press info during playback. It can also be set to display when the video is paused in Copacetic > Settings > Customisations. But I can't remember off the top of my head if it's in there.

5. Oh no idea about this I never tried it. If something's missing I'll see what happens in other skins and update accordingly, thanks for raising it

I'll post these issues on my GitHub later so I don't forget and you can keep track there if you like. Thanks,

https://github.com/realcopacetic/skin.copacetic

1. I don't see that path option appear when I enable it. Should it appear beneath the option? As I've said, for now I've selected the same mult image folder as  alternative background for each menu option. That works too. I couldn't enter custom paths like special://profile/backgrounds there btw, I was forced to navigate to the background folder.

2. Ah! I think that the Pellucid skin just always showed the OSD then. (I have been using it, and its predecessor skin, for years and years now, so it has become my point of reference.) It seems indeed that the Info button of my remote is caught by the TV and not passed on to Kodi. So that's why I never noticed this feature. It would indeed be nice to have a setting for this use case (i.e. unavailability of the Info button). Btw, I tried pressing Info via the Kodi app, and then the OSD still disappears after a few seconds too, so I couldn't get it to toggle.

3. Alright, yes, that also makes sense for longer playlists. It's just that the embedded music player widget looks different in the playlist from the simpler version in other views, but I get where it's coming from now.

4. You can set to show the remaining time for the paused screen, but not the end time. Maybe it could show that line at the top (that is shown when you start playing) when paused?

5. You're welcome

I was already wondering if you'd prefer me to file these issues and requests directly in GitHub? I don't mind!