Working on Fanart support

March 20th, 2010 by webmaster
Posted in enart.hznq.com | edit

So we've hashed out a lot of stuff over in the FR thread:
http://xboxmediacenter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30083&page=2

And i've started work on the code for Fanart support. Now while I did agree to step up and do this, I certainly wouldn't be averse to help if anyone wants to give it :) I'm most comfortable with the GUI code in XBMC so that is where i'm starting. If anyone wants to work on how the Fanart images/data will be retrieved/scraped I would be most grateful, but if not then i'll burn that bridge when I cross it.

This is my "todo" list as it were:
Add support for expansion of infolabels in various key tags
Add infolabels for the 6 fanart colors
Add infolabel for fanart image
Perhaps add an .nfo reader for local fanart data, or maybe expand the existing one used for movies. I havent' looked at this at all yet so not positive.
Add some method of scraping fanart data from TVDB and storing that dataThe first three items I am most confortable taking care of, and would be most appreciative of any help with the last two.

Could anyone give me a rough overview of the path from scraper xml to wherever that data ends up?

Just a brief high level overview of the classes involved would really speed things up for me. Say for a Television show scraper like TVDB.

The infolabel however must parse down to an ARGB hex color value, just like what you would enter manually in the XML files. If it doesn't, then all bets are off

You noticed the API returns RGB's formatted as (r,g,b) with each value being an int 0-255, right? You can convert to hex easily enough, as long as the scraper handles it or if you can do it in XBMC somewhere. Just wanted to make sure you noticed it.

Get it working by:

Adding variables (either a vector or even just DWORD[6] is my suggestion for colors) to videoinfotag.cpp, and reading and saving support in the Load()/Save() routines.

Not sure if anything else is needed wrt the scraper as it outputs XML in the same way.

Then you need to add the fields to the db. See the enum + offset stuff in videodatabase.h, and reading/writing in videodatabase.cpp. You'll also need to add db update functionality as you'll be adding fields. Probably a single field for colors and just pack them in (no need to search on them afterall) and a field for the fanart.

Finally, the infolabels which are the easy bit.

Cheers,
Jonathan

@szori
Great news! We are all anxiously awaiting this feature! It will give me the motivation to fix all the other little skin issues I have been putting off ;)

@agathorn
Thanks for all the hard work you have done. I definitely appreciate it! I'm sure it's not just skinners too, I bet every user is salivating right now in anticipation :D

hey is this for 4:3 too?

The problem lies more with the choices the artist makes. The auto ones were really not realiable at all. Sometimes one color would work better than another and oyu had no way of knowing.

IMHO there should be a "Style guide" so to speak that helps guide the artist to choosing the right colors when submitting. I think color 3 personally should be a color chosen that would be a good matte color for the image.

Though this is probably more on topic for posting in TVDB's forums though.

In the end its all down to what we scrape from TVDB and I have no control over that.

Thing is though I keep seeing you showing results with the same certain images. I have lots of fanart that when I do colors siiliar to what you are doing, the autocolors just bite.

I've now added support for local fanart IMAGES and will get it into SVN as soon as I can.

You can place a fanart.jpg, or fanart.png file in the shows main folder, IE:
TelevisionShowsStargate Atlantisfanart.jpg

And XBMC will use that as the fanart image. This method does NOT provide color information.

If a show already has fanart assigned to it, the fanart.jpg method wont' work, because it won't override what you already had set (for safety :p) so in order to change it simlply go to the Choose Fanart window, select BROWSE, and then select the local image you want to use as fanart.

Time for Eye Candy!

Jezz_X was kind enough to quickly put together a small test skin for me to use to test the Fanart so now we have screenies!

http://www.johnvanderbeck.com/files/screenshot001.jpg

http://www.johnvanderbeck.com/files/screenshot002.jpg

http://www.johnvanderbeck.com/files/screenshot003.jpg

http://www.johnvanderbeck.com/files/screenshot004.jpg

Now its VERY hard to notice (szori I think we really might want the ability for submitter specified colors?) because the colors are so dark and don't vary much, but if you look closely in each image you will see besides the obvious image, that the list highlight changes color based on the colors in the theme.

@agathorn, great work so far, thanks! ...so, I guess the next challenge is FanArt for Music Artists in XBMC library?
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=30083

http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x183/Mntz/fanart.jpg

wink wink, nudge nudge :grin:

By the way, here are some backdrops for some Music Artists:
http://jossan.visse.nu/~spuck/FanArtVote/

Great progress! Looking very nice. Can't wait to get my hands on it :nod:

Fixed some bugs that broke CGUIInfoColor when I revamped it

BUG: RSSFeedControl isn't displaying colors properly

Awesome work, agathorn! I've been really impressed with how you've taken it upon yourself to get this implemented properly. This will result in such a great improvement to the TV section of XBMC... I hope most people really realize what this means. If not, they're in for a pleasant surprise once the skins implement it. :D

Just so everyone's aware, the top fan art returned by TheTVDB is the highest rated fan art for that series. So voting for art will result in better results when scraping. I'll soon be switching it so it returns the fan art with the highest Bayesian score, which you can see an explanation of here: http://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?p=2977#2977

In any case, voting on fan art = good results when scraping. Keep that in mind. :)

Thankyou, Agathorn. i can't wait to see this added to the trunk and gain support in skins. I know you have put alot of time into this and i for one am very appreciative.

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=30083&page=6@szsori, do you think it would be a good idea to add FanArt support to Movie-XML.com (http://www.movie-xml.com)? ???
(Movie-XML (http://www.movie-xml.com) Online Movie Database that uses the same open source code as TheTVDB.com (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tvdb/))

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=32369&page=4I've been working on movies fanart support:
- I made ~400 fanart images (all 1920x1080) mostly for movies in my library and they are currently loaded from fanart folder located in MeedioData folder
- images are named based on IMDb ID number so there would be no duplicates
e.g.
The Departed = tt0407887.jpg
- maybe this could be useful for XBMC (as far as I can tell Aeon skin could use them as backdrops right out of the box)...

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/8661/fanartux2.jpg (http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/3719/fansy6.jpg)

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/2715/media2lb5.jpg (http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/470/mediazp5.jpg)

http://thetvdb.com/wiki/index.php/API:banners.xml
Scroll to "Colors". It's all ready for you. I'm working on going through all the current fan art and setting the artist colors. I should be done sometime tomorrow (60 down, 400+ to go). The colors should be much more usable now. :)

Ok so my original plan was pretty similiar to what you suggested JM, but I was trying to minimize the memory overhead so instead of making a new class to contain the new colors, I was packing things into the existing color variables, with a couple booleans to work as flags.

This wasn't working properly though and as I dug around trying to find what was wrong, I realized I was missing a part of the infolabel parsing.

In hindsight now I think a class like you suggest is a better alternative considering the amount of code needed. Like I said originally I wanted to avoid that new memory overhead, but since it doesn't seem an issue to you that's what i'm going to go ahead and do.

Thanks for the tip!

Very nice ;) Thanks again for the hard work!

Curious how this was going?
http://thetvdb.com/colorchooser.php?id=20100

Getting there. Doing the final submit won't do anything yet. I still want to do 4 things before taking this live:

1. Make the form work so it actually saves those values in the correct field.
2. Set the API so it returns the artist colors in addition to the autocolors (I'll also make a combined_colors for XBMC to make it easier to scrape).
3. Display the current artist colors and (possibly?) allow them to keep the existing color.
4. Update the wiki with examples to guide proper color selection and link from the color chooser.

I'll probably also go through most of the submitted banners and do the colors for them. Artists will still be able to do their own colors, but I want to make sure this is usable in the API.

Mntz side track here but if you run the Linux exec with the -q command line option it will get rid of the debug info at the top

Pretty much the same thing spiff had said earlier. I was trying to find the whole chain to make sure I understood it all, but I guess i'll just concentrate on those areas and have faith that its all connected :p

Great work agathorn. Can't wait to get to work on this! Cheers.

added: skin conditional "Fanart.HasFanart" returns true if the TV show has a fanart image available, false if not

Although good is that really needed can't you just use !IsEmpty(Fanart.InfoLabel)

Rewrote the underlying color code for , , , , and to use a new "infolabel aware" class, CGUIInfoColor

The above tags now support infolabels in all controls that use them including:
ButtonControl
ButtonScroller
CheckMarkControl
FadeLabelControl
LabelControl
ListItem
ListLabel
MultiSelect
RSSControl
SettingsSliderControl
SpinControl
TextboxControl

Optimized CGUIInfoColor a bunch

Thanks JMarshall for all your help and support!

The progress sounds great! Looking forward to it :D One question, are you agathorn, or has anybody else, considered adding support for localized fan art, ie fanart.jpg that you put in the root of that show's folder? I have a very large database of tv shows and I try to keep everything I can local so that I'm not spending as many hours and hours redownloading all the images everytime I do a clean install of XBMC. The only thing about that is that you would probably need some way of specifying the color themes associated with the file.

for local fanart / scraped fanart see CVideoInfoTag::Load() (and Save()). just add another member variable and a suitable xml tag, that tag will be read from nfo files and from the xml returned from the scraper. if you need to store it, find a suitable column (see the enum's and structs in VideoDatabase.h).

Thanks spiff, i'll take a look at that when I get to that point. I appreciate the point in the right direction.

Hey agathorn, i'm wondering if it's possible (and not to much work) to also get the old colors back, the ones generated by the website. Something like .AutoColor1 .AutoColor2 .AutoColor3
I've done some tests and i'm amazed that the generated colors fit a lot better then the ones entered by a person. I don't know if other skinners notice the same thing in their skin/tests.

Here are some quick examples.
Left = generated, Right = userinput

http://users.edpnet.be/desertstorm/fanartcompare1.png

http://users.edpnet.be/desertstorm/fanartcompare2.png

http://users.edpnet.be/desertstorm/fanartcompare3.png

I can help with #5, I'm pretty good at coming up with short algorithms to parse data, show me a couple examples of your expected matches within the haystack, and a couple haystacks, and anything else I need to know.You will need to start by download the latest tvdb.xml as the RegEx XML code for it should be added to it as an option (similar to how IMPAwards and MoviePosterDB are options in imdb.xml, so you want to download that as well to use as an example):
https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk/XBMC/system/scrapers/video/

Also read up on TheTVDB's API:
http://www.thetvdb.com/wiki/index.php?title=Programmers_API

Then you want to read (and reply if needed) to this topic thread:
http://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?p=2777

PS! More about the XBMC's own scraper API can be found in our wiki:
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=How_To_Write_Media_Info_Scrapers
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Scraper
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Scrap
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Import_-_Export_Video_Library
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Regular_Expression_%28RegEx%29_Tutorial

Happy coding!

How I'd do it is replace all instances of color (there's not that many I think - diffusecolor, and the text/focus/select/shadow colors) with a CColor class, which combines the color with the integer condition. Then you have a Get() routine to request the color. This causes the infomanager to be hit every frame though, but I don't really see any way around that to be honest.

One thing you'll need to watch is that the colors for text are in general passed to the GUITextLayout class (where the text is cached) so you'll need them there as well.

Any ideas you have would be great to know - we can chat via IRC or gchat or whatever if you like - PM me for my gmail info, and let me know when a good time for you is. I'm normally around 8-22 NZ time.

Cheers,
Jonathan

That is pretty much how I did it, though I packed the data in a bit tighter, since I didn't want to use up too much memory.

Fixed: Element tags that were not present would not properly fallback. This also fixes the RSS control issue

Speak English, dammit! ;)

I'll have fan art on the site and into the interfaces this weekend. I know you're waiting on me. :)

hey is this for 4:3 too?

This is just data that is available to the skin to display however it wants. 4:3 or 16:9 is irrelevant.

@agathorn
Thanks for all the hard work you have done. I definitely appreciate it! I'm sure it's not just skinners too, I bet every user is salivating right now in anticipation :D

Its something that I as a user wanted, so it seemed only fair to step up and do it. That's how opensource works :)

Yeah, I've been thinking more and more about those colors. They're not too useful now since they wash out and tend to be all light for light images and all dark for dark ones. Perhaps I should switch it to allow the artist to specify light, medium, and dark highlight colors? I could leave the current colors field and make another one, or just switch the current one to match.

awesome man! we all really appreciate your hard work :D

if only more ppl had that attitude....

You noticed the API returns RGB's formatted as (r,g,b) with each value being an int 0-255, right? You can convert to hex easily enough, as long as the scraper handles it or if you can do it in XBMC somewhere. Just wanted to make sure you noticed it.

Yep I JUST started looking at what the API returned and saw that. I'm still figuring out the whole scraper internals in XBMC but I don't think it will be an issue to convert the values over.

Great work agathorn! You've really helped push this fanart thing trough and all us skinners definitely appreciate it! :nod:

Ok so the patch is now in for MOST of the backend GUI stuff.

Thanks JMarshall for getting that in this morning/last night, and for taking it the rest of the way to work on as well. I had planned to do that today, but ya beat me to it :)

So, for the record:
, , , , , All now support infolabels of the form $INFO[Blah], or even simply Blah. The infolabel however must parse down to an ARGB hex color value, just like what you would enter manually in the XML files. If it doesn't, then all bets are off :p

This should work in all controls, except maybe the XLink Kai stuff which JMarshall informs me is dead :p If anyone encounters any bugs please let me know. I'll certainly support this code.

Now that that is said, i'm moving on to build in the new Infolabels for fanart support, and then to actually grabbing data.

Here are some screen shots of Implemented into my Basics-Vision Skin Naturaly its the same layout as the others since I made that layout too But you are not restricted to that layout obviously

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/th_screenshot028-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/screenshot028-1.jpg) http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/th_screenshot027-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/screenshot027-1.jpg) http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/th_screenshot026-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/screenshot026-1.jpg)

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/th_screenshot025-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/screenshot025-1.jpg) http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/th_screenshot024-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/screenshot024-1.jpg) http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/th_screenshot023-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/Basic-Vision/screenshot023-1.jpg)

Speak English, dammit! ;)

I'll have fan art on the site and into the interfaces this weekend. I know you're waiting on me. :)

Sounds good! Though to be honest i'm not really waiting on you, not yet anyway. Still working on getting the internals all setup to make this work. With that said though, it will be nice to be able to manually grab some of the stuff if its available through the site (outside of the API) then I can use them in testing even before the scraping is written.

Nice progress!
Is the testskin public available?
It would be handy to see the coding :)

@Gamester
are there any sites that host fanart for music? Or are you only talking local fanart inclusion for music?

Nice progress!
Is the testskin public available?
It would be handy to see the coding :)

Mntz Its not that complicted really you just make your layout and use a image info label of Fanart.Image and you have I think six color ones that go Fanart.Color1 , Fanart.Color2 , Fanart.Color3 .......... and so on.
Of Course you will need to take into account that the series has no fan art so you will need to use something like !IsEmpty(Fanart.Image) to toggle a alt background. Thats about it really the rest is just normal skinning

I was today foremost thinking about local FanArt for music-artists that have to be downloaded manually by the user from sites such as http://jossan.visse.nu/~spuck/FanArtVote/

...but hopefully any implementation will also be 'future-proof' by adding a new entry for fanart link in the music database (in the way that it will not be too much work to extend it later) so that any such music-websites pops up in in the future that could be scraped for FanArt.

Does anyone know of any website where music-artist FanArt can be searched for in a unified way (maybe even via an open API)?

my suggestion is to add a class which can output info as xml.
reason is db storage - you will want to store all fanart info in a single field, not 6 dwords + 1 string or whatever. something along CScraperUrl (dont laugh too much at my nasties in there).

Ok this is now in SVN, thanks jmarshall!

Very nice! Thanks again for all the hard work you have put into this! I guess I know how I am spending my day tomorrow ;) Cheers.

I had to take the images i already had since i can't make any new ones with generated colors :)
But i agree a style guide is also a solution.

It's best to make it as universal as possible IMO.Universal as in it should be able to be used in the music section as well as the videos (TV-Shows) section?

A lot has happened over the last couple of days. Thanks to C-Quel providing me with an updated tvdb scraper, i've been able to work on the data side of things. I'm happy to say that at this point, I have the Fanart data being scraped, saved, and available to the InfoLabels.

IOW at this point, in a basic state, Fanart is working! However with that said, there is a lot of cleanup and optimization that will need to be done. Since i'm unfamiliar with a lot of the code i'm working with, i'll talk to JM tonight about that. Also theres bound to be bugs :p In addition at this time the fanart support is limited to only the first returned fanart from TVDB, and local fanart is not supported.

Despite that though, the fact is we're really close and I would expect something to hit SVN within the next few days.

I myself am definitely hoping fan art gets extended to the music section, even if there's no scrapers to accompany it. It really adds a lot to the screen, which is especially nice since there's not as much you can really do with the music section as you can with the video section right now to fill the screen and make it interesting

Nice progress!
Is the testskin public available?
It would be handy to see the coding :)

Sorry i have to giggle at this one :) agathorn and co. will understand why...

And no mate its not available currently.

Ok then. Well after spending the last 10 hours or so trying to track down a very elusive bug, only to find out that the problem was a bad incremental build, I just want to cry.

Looks very nice. Those auto chosen colors where good as well.

You never do anything small do you :)

I'd recommend still having only 6 colors, perhaps 3 auto and the 3 chosen. 6 seemed kinda large to begin with.

Not to mention that if the amount of returned colors changes, I got a lot of code to rework :p

Ok yay! The last piece of this has been submitted as a patch for approval and inclusion into SVN.

So hopefully, if my code passes muster, this should be in XBMC very soon.

szsori: One possibility may be to increase the saturation of the colours after you grab them from your sample? Code for RGB<->HSV is available here:

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ncs/color/t_convert.html

Along with a style guide, perhaps you could give the colors different names to help the artists choose. For example, as agathorn suggested a matte color, or a list color, etc. Show on the style guide how each of these could/should/would be implemented and hopefully the artists can make more informed decisions. Just a thought.

Because you are extremely curious, and because it may be informative to others writing patches, and because I'm certain that Agathorn won't mind, here's the original diff Agathorn sent me:

http://xbmc.pastebin.org/25391

Note the tvdb scraper changes are not included.

And here is what ended up in SVN:

http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbmc?view=rev&revision=12300

And because I'm feeling especially generous (or more to the point am just plain bored :p) here's the SVN mailing for that commit (i.e. unified diff):

http://xbmc.pastebin.org/25575

Cheers,
Jonathan

Ok gang, as of SVN revision #12300, Fanart support is now in XBMC.

It is VERY late (2am for me) at the moment, so I will be waiting until tomorrow to update the wiki. However I did want to take a moment to just briefly cover things for you.

First off, this is INITIAL support. It is basic, and can/will be expanded. Local fanart is NOT supported. At this time only fanart scraped from TVDB is supported.

I did manage to work in the code for choosing fanart, which I initially didin't expect to be in right away. So you do have the ability to select which fanart image you want to use for a TV show.

While this code has been tested by a few people, it is a lot of code all together and my familiarity with the guts of XBMC isn't exactly expert level :p so there may very well be bugs. If you find any please just let me know.

Skin authors I will make another post inthe Skin Development section with the skinning details.

I'm also enhancing the colors a little more, which will probably result in Colors 1-3 being the best ones for skins to implement. I'll post more tomorrow, after I get it working as I want.

Curious how this was going?

What's your plan in that regard? It's best to make it as universal as possible IMO.

Sweet thanks!

I went and reset the colors on my fanart to save you the trouble.

Cool! :)
I'd be interested in looking at it, paste it on pastebin.

Just so everyone's aware, the top fan art returned by TheTVDB is the highest rated fan art for that series. So voting for art will result in better results when scraping. I'll soon be switching it so it returns the fan art with the highest Bayesian score, which you can see an explanation of here: http://forums.thetvdb.com/viewtopic.php?p=2977#2977

In any case, voting on fan art = good results when scraping. Keep that in mind. :)That is great! ...off-topic; will the same rating-system be implemented for TV-show banners as well? :cool:

huh?

if you want to look at the changes, just fetch the diff from svn

That is great! ...off-topic; will the same rating-system be implemented for TV-show banners as well? :cool:

It is already. I'll probably be working on the Bayesian stuff over the next week, since the wife and baby will be out of town. I'm also enhancing the colors a little more, which will probably result in Colors 1-3 being the best ones for skins to implement. I'll post more tomorrow, after I get it working as I want.

Try using the midtone color (should be color3) for the gradient on the side and then using dark accent color (color2?) for your title and for the menu color. It looks like you're using the dark accent for everything.

Thanks for the help. Don't rush out though because they're still tying up all the loose ends at TVDB so the API probably doesn't include the support for Fanart quite yet. Keep an eye on that thread Gamester17 pointed out at the TVDB forums.

Its not for anything yet :) but the intention will be to keep supporting what we currently do and have done for many years so odds are... 99.9% probably yes!

Fan art is in the API now (banners.xml, Base Series Record, and GetSeries.php). It should stay the same unless there's something significant that isn't working. If you notice it not working properly, let me know.

What's your plan in that regard? It's best to make it as universal as possible IMO.

I want to. Unfortunately in looking at it, the system really wasn't designed to be universal. Ideally every tag should be able to parse an infolabel, but it looks like it just wasn't set up to allow this. Without a major rewrite I don't see it happening, but you know the code better than I.

Right now i'm just handling required tags on a per-case basis, and expanding the infolabels at render time for the colors. However it isn't done, and i'm having some problems with it so I may step back a few levels and re-think it. Certainly open to suggestions.

added: initial support for infolabels in , , and in Label controls.

Here are a couple of 720p examples since Agathorn seems to be using Low def 16x9

CLICK THEM TO GET BIG ONES

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/temp/th_screenshot005-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/temp/screenshot005-1.jpg) http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/temp/th_screenshot004-1.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/temp/screenshot004-1.jpg) http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/temp/th_screenshot002.jpg (http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a273/Jezz_X/temp/screenshot002.jpg)

Although good is that really needed can't you just use !IsEmpty(Fanart.InfoLabel)

DOH!

added: skin conditional "Fanart.HasFanart" returns true if the TV show has a fanart image available, false if not

Yep thats pretty much it :)

Also make sure you do the IsEmpty() check on colors as well if you plan to use the color labels.

sounds great man! Looking forward to it. Now if only I can get a replacement motherboard and I could actually USE xbmc for once

I hope that post above doesn't change your mind if you were going to share the pastebin link agathorn.

#If you have any other info about this subject , Please add it free.#

Working on Fanart support

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