Grab the popcorn.

Dim the lights.

The first teaser for the all-new PreShow Experience 1.0 has arrived.

The teaser is a screen recording shown at 3× speed to provide a quick look at what the new PreShow can create.

PreShow Experience has been rebuilt from the ground up with one main goal: make it easier to create and enjoy a personalized theater experience while improving the advanced capabilities longtime users want.

This is more than a visual refresh. The new version introduces:

• A guided setup process for new users

• A redesigned interface

• A simpler approach to building a PreShow

• Improved management of local and online content

• Smarter content matching based on the selected feature

• Options to prepare and download content before movie night

• Expanded automation capabilities

• More control over trailers, bumpers, ratings, audio-format demonstrations, slideshows, music, and other presentation elements

The biggest addition is the new Infotainment module.

Infotainment creates a dynamic presentation based on the movie you are about to watch. It can combine animated movie trivia, cast challenges, obscured actors, movie scrambles, quotes, taglines, production facts, filmmaker connections, movie stills, multiple-choice questions, feature introductions, and other interactive content.

More than 20,000 new trivia entries have been developed to support it, covering movies, actors, directors, characters, franchises, and filmmaking history. The system is designed to feel like a curated show rather than a repeating slideshow.

Existing image-based trivia can still be used in the new Infotainment presentation.

The familiar building blocks of PreShow are still here, including trailers, countdowns, theater intros, courtesy messages, short films, rating cards, audio-format demonstrations, slideshows, loops, bumpers, and automations. They are now presented through a system intended to be easier to configure, maintain, and expand.

PreShow Experience 1.0 is coming soon.

Watch the teaser and let me know what you think. I'll be back in a few weeks with a narrated behind the scenes look at how I set up the PreShow.

This looks amazing! Excited to evaluate when it's ready!!

Pretty cool! Looking forwards on testing it!

I can't wait to try this, I have used your addon for years and it is great one to have in Kodi.

Now the question I have is this:

Will this work with non-library/.strm items?

I am asking this, because I am interested to know if it will work with TMDBHelper, the one I use to play most of my movies. I like using TMDBHelper not just because of its players feature, but also because you can avoid adding items to the Kodi database/library by using a JSON file and import it in the widgets as a mdblist local list. You can then get all the movies displaying in Kodi, without having to deal with Kodi's database and its archaic rigid design.

But to give an example: I created a player to point to a SMB share, another one to a .m3u8 playlist, and a fallback with an addon so I just hit play and the TMDBhelper players find the item and then play it, I just play and it will either find SMB Share or the .m3u8 file or go to the addon to see if it finds the media, so you can see the advantages of it, of course, when you add items to library from TMDBHelper it adds them as .strm, then you can scrape them and have them in library, which works great with PE, but it would be nice to just edit a JSON file and see the new movies added, remove the object in the JSON file, done, no Kodi's database to do the same job but more complicated.

Currently when you hit the Preshow Experience button in context menu from a TMDBhelper widget, it says "No movies are in queue" and if you force the item to queue with the context menu -> Queue Item, and then go again to the PreShow experience in context menu, you can see the item with the same data that a library item would get, title and year and genre and everything looks the same, but when you play the item it says JSONRPC: Value does not lay between minimum and maximum in type movieid and JSONRPC: Invalid property "movieid" in type (and then many errors everywhere), but it would be nice if you could just use a random widget, library or non-library and make it work.

Of course if you add the item to the library it works great, even if the TMDBHelper player has to use some search in whatever addon. Recently I even made the test and it works with .strm files even if they haven't added to the library, and they don't even have any movieid attached or metadata or anything, it only says {filename}.strm and done.

So basically, it would be nice if it PreShow Experience 1.0 worked with Widgets from addons as well, and not just library items (or .strm files).

Long question, but I hope you can see what I mean in case PE 1.0 is still not friendly with addons.

Thank you for your work and have a good day.

This is very exciting... Can't wait 🙃