Music Box 4 -Artist Fanart

[mvallevand]

I have made a small update to MusicBox4 to display artist fanart when you are in the JukeBox view. The update can be downloaded from the NextPVR wiki http://www.nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?....MusicBox4

For installation you need to install the latest version and also create a folder called Media\Artists in the NextPVR DataDirectory to store the fanart. As MusicBox4 plays it is configured to automatically fetch this fanart from a great community source called Home Theater Backdrops http://www.htbackdrops.com/v2/index.php If you like fanart like this I urge you to join and promote the site, I believe these backdrops make a nice addition to MB4.

Since some of your music artists may not be tagged or be found on htdbackdrops rather a generic backdrop you can create your own personal backdrop collection and store them in the Skin folder in

Skin\Default\MusicBox4\Backdrops

Again Home Theater Backdrops has a nice starting collection here http://www.htbackdrops.com/v2/thumbnails.php?album=9 but any HD 16:9 art that you like can be added and it will be shown

There are also some small fixes in this version that I don't remember and albums are now sorted in Year order when the information is available.

Thanks once again to ACTCMS and Jaggy for their testing and comments that continue to enhance this plugin so much. If you have any support questions please post them the general plugin support forum.

Martin

[martint123]

Nice - I must have a go again with this.

[pcostanza]

Very nice work, thanks very much for this.
Mine appears to be working just fine with the exception that every time I open an artist, this pops up. I've created the new Media/Artist folder but as I said, it appears to be working correctly.

EDIT: Never mind...I added the 'backdrops' folder and it no longer gives me this error.

[imilne]

Looks good Martin. Will try to give it a go when I get the chance...

Iain

[gEd]

I am not a user of the plugin myself but I have to say that looks really slick.

[mvallevand]

Thanks for all the feedback. Paul, I posted an update to get rid of that debug popup.

Iain, if you interested MusicBox4 can also be configured to display (but not download) artist fanart on the artist selection menu. I disabled this because I find it too slow, because it is directory based and not db driven but it might give you an idea of the overhead for your plugin To enable it add this line to MusicBox.xml to see for yourself.

<SelectionFanart>true</SelectionFanart>

The Default skin is definitely not optimized for selection fanart.

Martin

[Jaggy]

One "bug" I just noticed is that it is showing the FanArt for "Dionne Warwick" while the track playing is actually being performed by "Dion" the guy

[ACTCMS]

One "bug" I just noticed is that it is showing the FanArt for "Dionne Warwick" while the track playing is actually being performed by "Dion" the guy

In the first place, I'd say you got the best of the bargain there

And it was probably how SSPlus would behave...

Alex

[mvallevand]

One "bug" I just noticed is that it is showing the FanArt for "Dionne Warwick" while the track playing is actually being performed by "Dion" the guy

This is probably because the Dion with album match name wasn't found on MusicBrainz.org so MB4 could not get an exact match. When that happens MB4 will rely on what htbackdrops returns which normally is pretty good. An especially short name like Dion does not provide a lot of "resolution" and it could have returned Celine which would been less but equally wrong. If you delete Dion.jpg MB4 should not d/l Dion art any more.

Ultimately the success and failures will demand on how good the user community is in updating Musicbrainz.org and htbackdrops. Compilations and older albums and artists won't match as well as newer artists.

Martin

[Jaggy]

No worries I just thought I had better report it..... when I get "time" I will see what art I can find for Dion along with quite a number of other artist's that don't get FanArt.

Right now I have been concentrating on trying to get an update for SSPlus ready for release, but I think my side of the operation is just about finished now so it's "just" up too the other half................................