[MitchZombie]

Hi!
Love your Kodi Skin it's Amazing!
Was wondering if there's any plans later to support Advanced Emulator Launcher with more Views modes.

Also just an idea, maybe Add a Single Item Fan art sized widget if possible. (Quick mock ups)

[LtFrankDrebin]

@jurialmunkey Could you take a look at the suggestion I posted? Thanks. The skin feels overall considerably slower than a similar Arctic Zephyr setup. Playback is sometimes choppy on a 2nd gen FTV. It was completely fluent on AZ. Will you be doing optimisations in the future?

[mardup]

Hello
is it possible to add an option to remove text label on posters, in extendedinfos script widgets, because as you can see, posters images are cut
thnak you

[inkubux]

Thank you for the addition but same behavior, I cant understand why the same widgets work fine on horizon and not on this skin.

They work perfectly for me. 

I have the same issue, some widgets works some don't.

I did a complete reinstall of the skin and the widgets still have the same issue.

The first install the add-ons widgets did not work. the second time it was the TV Shows widgets.. All widgets works in Arctic Zephyr and Horizon

[chrispe]

Thank you for the addition but same behavior, I cant understand why the same widgets work fine on horizon and not on this skin.

They work perfectly for me. 

I have the same issue, some widgets works some don't.

I did a complete reinstall of the skin and the widgets still have the same issue.

The first install the add-ons widgets did not work. the second time it was the TV Shows widgets.. All widgets works in Arctic Zephyr and Horizon

Finally I managed to make all my widgets to work. Because I am not home I ll give you a small tip how I made it and if you need more infos I will answer tomorrow. So what I did was, starting from left to right, to delete the menu with problematic widgets and recreating it from scratch. After checking that widget is working I moved to the next problematic menu

[Gatman]

Incredible work! Your skins just keep getting better and better.

Is there any chance of you adding an Icons with Extra Info view similar to Arctic Zephyr? I tried to figure it out myself but was unsuccessful.

Thanks!

[Blurayx]

@jurialmunkey

whenever you get any spare time over the next few weeks could you please look into the alphabet strip not working in Kodi 18?
Apart from alphabet strip, Aura is working perfectly.

Great rework of the widget menu, They load lightning fast on my Nvidia Shield TV, well before the splash screen has finished loading 


Thanks

[LtFrankDrebin]

I'm also getting high memory usage with this skin. Kodi crashes in the first few seconds of a video playback etc. In Arctic: Zephyr for example sys info shows that I still have ~250MB of free memory, this goes down to ~140MB or so in Aura. I'm only using 3 home screen widgets. One of them displays only 3 shows (in-progress shows). It's nigh unusable in AFTV 2nd gen. Really unfortunate that in it's current state it ticks all the boxes for me. I just wish that it was memory efficient. Is the memory situation a permanent one or will you be optimising it? Thanks again for your work.

PS: I'm using the latest git.

[Airwolfuk]

@jurialmunkey

been a fan of your other skins so just had to give this a try

installed the latest git version over a build that has lots of menu items

when switching to Aura, the menu does not scroll and i cannot find the basic kodi settings menu option

the only way to get back is to ssh in and delete the aura skin folder.

appreciate its alpha but am i missing something?

thanks

[jurialmunkey]

@joeyd2424 - I haven't use RCB in a long time, but I don't think there is a way to add it as a widget. I'm holding off on adding much Games stuff until Leia, because Leia will have emulation suport built in.

@VikkiXavier
-- Images in info from widgets work perfectly fine for me. Make sure you are using a widget provided by the Library (i.e. NOT from an add-on like skin helper widgets). Widgets from add-ons such as skin helper widgets won't return the path, so there is not way for me to display the images as I can't get the path -- that's why its important to use widgets directly from the library (or the new "Default Widgets" section I added)
-- NextUp playback should be fixed now. Silly mistake on my end!
-- I like your idea about the trailer preview window. Unfortunately, many Android devices have trouble displaying video in a window , so I can't do it because it would break things for those users.

@mxlance -- Currently widget fanart is displayed through Skin Helper, that's why you are seeing the delay. You can get rid of the delay by getting API keys for fanart.tv omdbapi and themoviedb and then adding them to the API section script.module.metadatautils (accessible in Skin Settings > Manage Dependencies). As I said before, once I move onto Leia development, this will no longer be an issue.

@MitchZombie -- Thanks. I've enabled all the viewtypes for AEL. I haven't used AEL in a long time and don't have it set up, so I have no idea which views actually work properly / are suitable.

@LtFrankDrebin -- I won't be adding different variations of home screen layouts as it is a pain to manage. You can turn off the background overlay and vignette in Skin Settings > Effects. Also, please keep in mind that you are asking me to add more features yet somehow attempt to reduce RAM usage at the same time! The more different variations of widgets added, the greater the ram usage will be!! Particularly as, in my tests, the only main difference in RAM usage between Aura and Arctic is the widget setup.

That being said, I will likely add a double height widget at some stage in the future which will include additional info. Plus, I do have some ideas to reduce the RAM usage of widgets. However, both these things are a fair bit of work, so it's a case of it will happen when it happens.

Also, I'm not sure if you have a firetv stick or set-top box, but the Stick version only has 500mb of usable ram (rest is reserved for GPU), so it is almost impossible to avoid RAM issues without significantly cutting features. IF you have the set-top box, that is a different story, as the set-top has 2gb of ram and you really shouldn't be running into memory issues. My htpc setup only has 2gb and I never run out of RAM with Aura.

@Blurayx -- You will have to add any Skin Helper widgets from the Add-ons > Video Add-ons > Skin Helper Widgets section. I am reserving the Default Widgets section for Library widgets only.
RE: Alphabet strip -- I don't currently have v18 set-up as I have to compile from source as there aren't any precompiled nightlies for my OS (fedora), so I haven't got around to it yet. I will be starting work on a Leia version soon, so I will look into it when I do. However, I have a feeling it is a problem with skin helper rather than the skin.

@mardup -- Set the widget aspect to "Poster". In the widget customisation dialog, there is a little icon next to the spanner and pencil which looks like a picture icon. Clicking that will change the widget aspect. When set to "Poster" it will force poster aspect.

@inkubux -- Sounds like a completely different issue. I need more information. Which widgets are they? How did you set them? What exactly is happening. I need details so I can recreate the issue.

@chrispe -- Glad you got it working. Sound like there might have been a bit of an issue with the Skin Shortcuts cache. It might be useful to clear out its cache from by deleting all the files in .kodi/userdata/addon_data/script.skinshortcuts -- this will set skinshortcuts back to defaults.

@Gatman -- Yeah, there will be an extra info icons view, just haven't got around to it yet!

@Airwolfuk -- The skin is limited to 12 menu items -- there are some things that can't been done without limiting the number of menu items, plus there has to be a limit on the number of widgets otherwise the skin will run out of available ID numbers for the items. Nonetheless, if you can't see the settings item, you should still be able to access the settings through the shutdown menu ("S" on keyboard). I recommend a setup which uses mainmenu items as broad categories and then uses the submenu to provide additional options underneath.

[Blurayx]

@jurialmunkey 

Thanks for the info.
"starting work on a Leia version soon" 

[mxlance]

@jurialmunkey
thank you for the reply and info, will give it a try

[LtFrankDrebin]

@jurialmunkey thanks for the reply. It appears the ram issue wasn't caused by the skin. It was just the stick running some stuff in the background. I restarted it and it was fixed. Sorry, I should've tried that first.

I may have worded it a bit incorrectly so I'll try again to clear any misunderstandings: Is it possible for the skin to show just some basic info (plot summary etc.) when going over a home screen widget poster?

I really appreciate your work, please don't get me wrong. I'm just feeling very enthusiastic about this skin for some reason.

Btw, is it possible to remove the vignette but keep the background overlay? I tried checking just the overlay but it didn't work, the vignette was still there.

Thanks for your time.

[jamesdm]

Firts GREAT WORK with the skin jurial. Second there's any way to keep the rating locally save insted of getting of the internet every time that i turn on the box?
Thanks.

[jurialmunkey]

I may have worded it a bit incorrectly so I'll try again to clear any misunderstandings: Is it possible for the skin to show just some basic info (plot summary etc.) when going over a home screen widget poster?

Btw, is it possible to remove the vignette but keep the background overlay? I tried checking just the overlay but it didn't work, the vignette was still there.

The widget heights are all arranged so that in mouse mode two widgets fit perfectly on screen at the same time when the categories widget is disabled -- this makes for a really effective mouse layout. I'm really not a fan of solutions that dim other posters or show an info overlay popup after a set period of time. Not to mention that dimming wont work as the focused item can be any position in the list and is not fixed to the left. A widget with info will need extra vertical space to accommodate the extra info like plot. As I mentioned, it will need to be double height to ensure that the vertical spacing between widgets stays the same. I will eventually add a widget like this, but I want to redo some of the widget code to optimise it a bit better before I go adding extra features.

Also, regarding RAM/CPU. There will likely get better once the skin is on the repo and thus will have an included Textures.xbt file.

I've added the ability to disable vignette whilst keeping the colour overlay on the latest git.