[cybertheque]

Greetings,

I need to run Kodi (on android appliances) as IPTV only - no PVR, no local or remote media files and with menus for all unused services removed or hidden. I chose Transparency! on forum post recommendations and because it comes equipped with controls for most Kodi features. At the moment, I have only the 'TV' screen displayed to the user but with a large number of streaming sources, navigating the menu is cumbersome. I would like to have multiple instances of the 'TV' functionality, selected at a higher level screen (home screen), each assigned to categories of streams (delivered using iptv-simple) such as 'local OTA tv', 'network tv', 'music streams', 'movie streams', etc. I also need to have certain buttons removed from the toolbar that don't apply (such as 'record'). Settings are currently protected in profile settings with a password.

Do I need to rewrite the code for the screens such as 'movies' 'tv shows' 'music' etc. to reflect this functionality or is there a simpler way to clone the 'tv' screen over multiple instances? I have only perused the skinning manual and don't relish the idea of having to climb the learning curve for this with so much else to do in this project.

I am also hoping to load background artwork as advertising (rather than fanart) dynamically using some protocol like http, and having an RSS feed crawl for notifications of interest to the viewer (rather than Kodi development info).

Is this possible within the framework of this skin? Or at all in Kodi?
Is there any serious overhead in using this skin for such a minimalistic use case as compared to a more lightweight one?

[ronie]

I would like to have multiple instances of the 'TV' functionality, selected at a higher level screen (home screen), each assigned to categories of streams (delivered using iptv-simple) such as 'local OTA tv', 'network tv', 'music streams', 'movie streams', etc.

i'm not an expert in the livetv functionality in kodi, but i don't think it's possible to split the streams into separate categories?
as far as i know they all are merged into one listing.

[ronie]

ah, you can use channel groups of course to split channels into categories.
though i don't think it's possible to open a certain category right from the homescreen.
this would require changes in kodi core.


to answer some of your other questions,

transparency is not a lightweight skin, it depends on the hardware you're gonna use if it's a fitting skin to use or not.

since you want to modify the skin, transparency is certainly not the easiest skin to work with, due to the large amount of customizations this skin allows,
the code is rather complex and will easily break when not fully understood

i don't think skins can directly fetch artwork from the internet. afaik this requires a addon that runs in the background and makes artwork available to the skin.