Matt

@FlexThat was a mislabeled file. Nature's Fury is for Dolby Atmos and is available here:

Thanks for catching the issue.

@NightWatcherTheater I'll have to think about this.  I think I understand what you are asking, but the solution may be overly complicated. 

Other than the delay, there's technically nothing wrong with sending Hue lights the same command.  If they are already at a certain brightness there's no visible change.

Do you often play movies without chapters?

I have continued to work on this and have added a new setting for Kodi's listed aspect ratio.

My issue with this setting, and the reason that I didn't go this route originally, is that I don't know if it is correct.  Unless you use TMM as @hslansky suggested or have your videos cropped and recompressed like @Epitaph's list, they will all be 1.78 : 1 as that's what a full frame blu-ray with black bars is.  

I have made the assumption that if you use nfo files, Kodi will have already scraped the data from them and we can just use that.  So there is now a sub-setting for this in PreShow to select how you want it handles.

I'm not sure if that's the right wording, but Kodi has a character limit on the settings, and to explain it properly requires scrolling.

And then I've modified the IMDB selection option to give the user some more control.  Originally I tried to make it so that it would pick the most likely option for movies that list multiple options. That worked for the majority of cases, but not all.  There are some that aren't labelled correctly, and then there's always the multi-aspect movies.  Now you'll get a pop-up so that you can select which one you want.  

Thanks for the suggestion @hslansky & @Epitaph.

My goal is to always make a solution that works without the need for other applications.  I'll explore other options in the future and already have plans to do some work with nfo files, which may offer better options for a few processes.

@FlexMake sure you restart kodi after installing PreShow.  The context menu doesn't load until after a restart.  Or install a skin that supports PreShow.

Here's a link to the skins that I've worked on to make PreShow compatible:

https://preshowexperience.com/files/category/7-skins/

The skin in the images is Aeon Nox: Silvo

@ervau 0.3.0 isn't official yet.  Because there are so many underlying elements that have been changed, I'm doing a couple rounds of testing with it.  The next version of it will have the updated action files.

Here's a link to the previous version, which broke Kodi trailers and trivia:

@marius Thanks for the suggestion.

As of this version, they are just global options in the settings and can't currently be customized per movie..  The main thing that I'm doing is adding he underlying code so that this sort of functionality is possible.  The next step is to have people test it to see if the functionality has issues.  I think last chapter does a good job for a significant percentage of movies. 

My ultimate goal is to make it time based with community support, so that if 1 person puts in the correct location of the credits that it will work for everyone else.

I also have work to do on action files within sequences, but that's a ways off.

I think that the file you want to edit is DialogNotification.xml.  

Are you trying to show an image for the intermission with GUI.ShowNotification?  If so, I think that the only image in the notification is the icon.  

One of the changes in 0.3.0 is the addition of new locations for actions.

As shown in the image above, the action category in the PreShow settings now has 4 new possible locations for actions.  These are:

• At the beginning of the PreShow sequence
• Before the feature
• At the last chapter 
• At the middle chapter

The beginning of a PreShow & before the feature should simplify sequences for people that have specific automations before their movies. Before the feature happens after ratings.

The last chapter provides some option for automations at the credits.  I know this won't work for all films, or all video files.  It also require that the file have more than 1 chapter.

The middle chapter is for people that want a pre-planned intermission in the middle of the movie.  I decided to use chapter instead of time based with the hopes that you'll be at the beginning of a scene and not in the middle.  There are no new features related to intermissions in this build, other than the action trigger.

Note that both chapter points are checked every few seconds, so the action may not trigger exactly at the chapter change.

I haven't tested youtube links, but will look into it.

The kodi trailer issue was reported in the discord ane has been fixed. I am testing a couple other things that have been reported and will post an update for it as soon as I can.

The code that you want is something along the lines of:

sleep://3600000

http://username:password@ip#:8080/jsonrpc
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"Input.ExecuteAction","params":{"action":"playpause"},"id":0}

sleep://600000

http://username:password@ip#:8080/jsonrpc
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"Input.ExecuteAction","params":{"action":"playpause"},"id":0}

Add other functions a you want. 

Make sure you have your system set up to allow this in settings > services > control.

Damn, 37 is young.

This won't fix your problem, but as a recommendation to people that may see this, please turn off app auto updates on the shield.  I am still mad about it modifying my system after I had it dialed in and not being able to quickly get it working perfectly again.

It is.  I also PMed it to you yesterday.

In 2015, Kodi’s default theme Confluence was growing long in the tooth. Most of the really exciting skins from that time accomplished far more, and Confluence was ultimately a 2009 update to an existing skin called MediaStream that was itself several years old. It was time for Confluence to retire. We needed something new that adhered to the UX best practices of the time.

I proposed some wireframes based on Google’s Material Design that were pretty vague, but I hoped would be enough to get us started. Almost immediately, members of our team of skilled skinners (Phil65 and Piers) jumped on the task. I made my initial suggestion early on the 17th of June, and Piers had already mocked up a complete home page later that day. His post at that time introducing the mockup had me chuckling for days. Once an idea struck him, the guy worked tirelessly to see it through.

By the 18th, a day later, Piers’ mockup was revamped and looked remarkably complete. Unfortunately, those early designs have been lost to the internet gods, but we do still have a screenshot of the first alpha created in August that remained quite true to those early mockups.

By September, Estuary was pretty well complete with two primary themes, the 3D-styled curial and the flat style which remains the default to this day. Piers and Phil65, along with several other skinners, notably BigNoid, had introduced a variety of features including the ability to select different color styles, like pink. The team also created a separate second skin designed specifically to work for mobile devices.

In 2016, these skins were officially released with Kodi 17 to universal praise within the community (for those interested in history, you can find the original blog post here). The work done by Piers and the team on UX/UI in 2015 and 2016 cannot be understated. They developed a lasting and original skin that remains in use to this very day.

We recently learned that Piers passed away. He was 37. He will be missed by those of us who worked with him on this project. We cannot emphasize enough his contribution to software seen and used by millions of people worldwide.

Thank you for everything, Piers.

View the full article

I think the issue that marius had has been resolved.

The move away from Python 2 doesn't affect us in any way.

I do have some code in there explicitly to make PreShow compatible with 19.  I don't have plans on removing that, but going forward I will probably spend less time making things compatible with 19 if there's a reason to change it in future versions of Kodi.  

Recently, Team Kodi proudly released Kodi v21 "Omega", the latest major release of our popular media centre software.

Our longevity and popularity means that Kodi is installed on literally millions of devices worldwide. For a range of reasons, not all of them are capable of supporting the newer releases; we do, however, try to maintain as much support as we can for the older releases, with our target being support for the previous two versions before the current one. The release of Omega thus moves Kodi Leia out of active support.

The final version of Kodi Leia (v18.9) was released in October 2020. Leia was also noteworthy as being the final version which made use of the Python 2 language, with Kodi Matrix and beyond using the newer Python 3. That move was made due to Python 2 being marked as end-of-life on 1st January 2020 by its authors, who now no longer support it and so it does not receive any updates or security patches. Python 3 is fully supported and updated, but Python 3 code is not directly compatible with Python 2.

This means that, as Kodi Leia moves out of support, so does Python 2 for Kodi. As a result, we will no longer be accepting any updates for Python 2 addons into our repository, and the Leia repo will be frozen. Any Leia installation will still be able to access the repo, but addon updates will only be accepted in Python 3, with the effect that they can only be run on Kodi Matrix or later. This will free up the Team Kodi volunteers who review addon submissions to focus entirely on Python 3 addons, making reviews simpler and faster and so minimising the delays between submission and release of acceptable addons into the repo.

This also means that older scrapers written in XML or Python 2 will not get any updates, so any changes made on the source database sites which break them will render them permanently broken. Most of these scrapers are long unsupported anyway, but as Leia and older versions are now end-of-life then the only solution will be to update to a newer version of Kodi using the supported Python 3 scrapers.

We thus bid a grateful farewell to Python 2, and put our focus now on updating and improving Kodi for the future.

View the full article

11 minutes ago, marius said:

Is anyone else having problems? I cant open PSE since the new version. Kodi is installed on a Shield Pro 2019

Thanks for sending me the log privately.  That's an issue that my test machines didn't have problems with, but exactly why I am doing this as a separate install, because I figured there may be problems like this.  I'll send you an updated version so see if we can get this fixed.

Can you see any files on the external drive?

Here's a video with a possible solution: 

Let me know if that helps.