Matt

I'm planning on releasing updates to some of the old content when I get the new trivia functionality completed. I'll post back when that happens.

Have you rescanned your content after adding/updating the trivia? In your trivia module settings is the "Trivia select" set to Default? Please share a log and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on. To share a log, close out of Kodi and then reopen it. Open Preshow and preview your Trivia module in the sequence editor. Then go into the PreShow settings and scroll down in the general tab until you see "paste my kodi.log to pastebin." Click that and then click "current." Next, click Show QR code and use your phone to get the link to the pastebin page. You can either share that in this thread or send me a direct message through the site with it.

Share a log and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on. To share a log, close out of Kodi and then reopen it. Open Preshow and try to save and open a sequence. Then go into the PreShow settings and scroll down in the general tab until you see "paste my kodi.log to pastebin." Click that and then click "current." Next, click Show QR code and use your phone to get the link to the pastebin page. You can either share that in this thread or send me a direct message through the site with it.

Have you set your content path in the settings and is it writeable? It is the 1st thing in the settings, as seen in the image below.

I've tested this on Windows 11 (I don't have anything with Windows 10) a few times and haven't encountered any issues with playback. No one in the Discord channel is reporting these issues, so my best guess is it is computer specific. I'll post back if I get any new suggestions.

Very cool, and nice work by tiben20. Let us know how it works.

@suchmich1983 There are some errors for jellyfin and a random youtube one, but I'm not seeing an exact cause from the logs. I'll try to set up a windows box to test and will respond back with any findings.

Awesome. Glad that you figured it out.

I've been travelling for work and just got home yesterday, so I haven't had any time to look into this. The previous log didn't show any errors related to PreShow. The only thing the log gives is: warning <general>: CRendererHQ::CheckVideoParameters: chosen scaling method 1 is not supported by renderer warning <general>: CVideoPlayerVideo::OutputPicture - timeout waiting for buffer I'm not saying that is what is causing the issue, just that they are the only clues that we currently have. I read a few posts about DXVA causing a similar issue. Here's a link to 1 of the posts.

IMPORTANT UPDATE, 30th April While we were proofreading this post and getting ready to publish it, we became aware of some terrible news: the OSUOSL is in very real danger of closing down at the end of this year due to recent funding changes, and they need immediate help. Lance Albertson, the Director of OSUOSL, explains it in his own words here. This matters so much. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of US public sector funding, this could send shock waves through so many open source projects if it's allowed to happen. Please, if you value their work - and we all should - and if there's anything you or your employer can do to help them, we'd ask you to do so. ---- It takes an army of people to create, maintain and deliver Kodi, but not everyone involved is a team member. As well as the obvious developers, graphics designers, forum moderators and similar, we're also hugely dependent on our sponsors for both financial help and donations of infrastructure. It's the latter category that we'd like to highlight today, specifically the Oregon State University Open Source Laboratory. The OSUOSL is a nonprofit organisation that works to advance open source technologies, seeking to accelerate the growth of high-impact open source software projects, and promote a global open source culture of accessibility and increased productivity. The lab partners with industry leaders and policy makers to bring open source technologies to new sectors, including education, health and government. To this end, they've been providing free hosting services for FOSS projects since 2003, and currently do so for more than 160 projects, including those of worldwide leaders like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Drupal - and, of course, Kodi. They offer world-class hosting services, professional software development and on-the-ground training for promising students interested in open source management and programming. The most active organisation of its kind, the OSL delivers nearly 430 terabytes of information to people around the world every month from its hosted sites. Specifically for Kodi, they currently host a significant 2U, 96-core system that runs most of our build systems, as well as separate platforms that host a big part of our public-facing infrastructure: the forum, the wiki, and our pastebin site. We're immensely grateful for their assistance and support, and want to publicly thank them for everything they do. OSUOSL is primarily funded through grants, corporate sponsorships and individual contributions from the community. Please see their website for how you can help them to continue providing services such as this. View the full article

Share a log and I'll try to help. To share a log, close out of Kodi and then reopen it. Play a feature with Preshow. Then go into the PreShow settings and scroll down in the general tab until you see "paste my kodi.log to pastebin." Click that and then click "current." Next, click Show QR code and use your phone to get the link to the pastebin page. You can either share that in this thread or send me a direct message through the site with it.

Day Three dawns. We have a compressed schedule today before we break for individual workshops/breakouts - plus some people will be leaving us early in order to get home - so let's get to work. neo1973 opened the day with a discussion about merge policies, specifically around reviews and self-merging your own PRs. There's a reality that, when you've been deep in a certain area of the code, you may well be the subject matter expert - for the moment, at least - so there's nobody to necessarily critique the what of your code. As such, there's an element of "publish and be damned". There is, though, also the how: does the code itself stand up to inspection? We already use tools to sanity check the code, check for null pointers and undestroyed variables, and similar, so the quality side is already covered to a certain extent. That said, AI tools are falling into place and improving quickly, so there's more that we can do here, and more to investigate. Onwards into a conversation initiated by yol around some of our hosted infrastructure and some specific issues we have there. That in turn led into a more general conversation around hardware, usage, I/O and capacity, and similar: important to us, but probably less so to the general public. Next up, chewitt with an update on LibreELEC: user numbers, current platform trends and future plans, dependency/kernel versioning, CI/build, upstreaming fixes, drivers, chipsets, hosting, finances, collaborations, architecture. For what should be obvious reasons, samnazarko weighed in where appropriate with an OSMC perspective. Finally, lrusak gave an update on a long-desired feature: headless Kodi. It basically exists, it works, but it needs a good chunk of tidying up to make 100% certain that nothing tries to create or access a GUI on a non-existent window manager (e.g. popping up a notification toast). There are headless implementations - such as Docker images - already available from other sources, so this is really just about bringing this into the official release. And, with that, the main conference comes to an end. Time to huddle together, fire up laptops, and do some coding. So, that's it for DevCon 2025. Genuine thanks to Tirana for the hospitality, and to everyone who's helped to look after us this year - and thanks to you for reading. Until the next time ... lamtumirë, dhe faleminderit. /images/blog/team-kodi-tirana-2025.webp Team Kodi 2025, Tirana View the full article

... and we're back! The skies are blue, the sun is shining, we're fed and refreshed, yet we're locked in a darkened, overly-warm, windowless room for today's session. The privations we suffer for our art; you really have no idea. Let's get to it, then - welcome to DevCon Day Two! We kicked off the session with a bit of administrative insight from keithah - how the Board operates, our bank account structure, what we use for 2FA and virtual postal addresses, interaction with tax authorities for our non-profit status, and similar. Nothing of interest to the outside world, but an insight for our team members on some more of the internal moving parts. While going through some of our open issues, one triggered a conversation (as these things do) about advancedsettings.xml versus GUI windows, and what, if anything, should be "promoted" from the former to the latter. Kodi is a complex application, and the GUI settings are already overwhelming for many, but asking advanced users to edit text files is a little old school (as well as being clearly inconsistent or just plain annoying on some platforms). A good example of this is the use of MySQL: very many people use it, but putting it into the GUI might simply give more people the opportunity to completely ruin their system because of LAN latency or a simple mistyped IP address. No specific conclusions, but it's clearly a conversation that will continue to run as new features are introduced, tested, and, ultimately, mainstreamed. There's room for improvement, however. Next up, garbear came back on to talk about shaders - specifically, work that's been underway for several years now to implement them in Retroplayer. For those who don't know, a shader is a computer graphics technique (program, piece of code) that controls the appearance of 3D graphics elements - colour, lighting, texture, reflectivity, and so on. To have these obviously has a significant impact on how a game looks, from 8-bit blockiness to smooth realtime rendering (although they obviously can't work miracles). There's a major pull request that's nearing completion, but there remain some final issues on OpenGL/OpenGL ES targets before it's all ready. As we finished that topic, well, once again, we went off on a tangent: the mere mention of GL/GLES sent us off down a whole different conversation, with lrusak, sarbes, chewitt and samnazarko weighing in - but one that's far too granular to summarise here. Broadly, OpenGL ES is targeted at embedded systems, so offers a subset of functions compared to OpenGL, but that means a disparity in features and thus compatibility. However, OpenGL ES enjoys wider platform support, so standardising on one or the other has a lot of appeal (or, indeed, on Vulkan, but that's an entirely different conversation). The next topic was a long one, involved very many people, and came in multiple parts: a broad fly-past of open internal issues (we use GitHub issues to capture and track issues across multiple external and internal topic areas: bug tracking, for general attention of the Team, for the Board, for blog topics, for this conference, and so on). So, discussions in varying depth around (variously) auto-closure of stale issues and PRs; managing permission groups and access rights (enforcing least privilege in a maintainable way); cleaning out old/unsupported add-ons; cleanup of repositories and GitHub organisations; policies and processes around inactive (and, ultimately, retired) team members; how best to use AWS and Azure credit versus what we run on existing servers; potential to move to an open-source messaging platform; the global regulatory landscape. And that's just about a wrap for Day Two. There's a little bit of both physical and virtual tidying up to do, but that's very much an "us" problem. We have a series of breakouts scheduled (and, inevitably, spontaneously spawning) for tomorrow, so we'll update you on those as and if relevant - so, maybe see you then! View the full article

<tap, tap, tap> - Is this thing on? Yes, it is, and so it's time to once again introduce the highlight of the Kodi year - friends and fellow travellers, welcome to DevCon 2025! This year we're coming to you from Tirana in Albania (or Tiranë in Shqipëri in the local language†). A country that, I suspect, most people know little about, Albania has a long and ... bumpy history, mostly involving other countries and some less-than-friendly regimes: Romans (both western Roman and eastern Byzantine), Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Italians, from imperial territory to independence, from international engagement to isolationist communism to modern democracy. Sitting astride both the Aegean and Ionic seas, the country now embraces the promise of full modernity and EU membership as it strives to turn its back on the darker chapters of recent history and take its rightful place in Europe. As in previous years, we're going to aim to do a daily update (content-dependent), so let's see how it goes. Without further ado, then, let's get straight into it with Day One. We began with round-table introductions and a typical retrospective: reminiscences for older heads, background for newer ones. We're coming up to a quarter of a century of XBMC/Kodi, and, as you'd expect, there's now a significant story of how we got to where we are, and some of the main contributors and contributions along the way. We continued with an update on the Foundation's financial position from keithah. We've always been very transparent that we're not a wealthy project, and we've never actively pursued financial gain for either Foundation or individuals. That hasn't changed, although money is gradually getting tighter as e.g. major sponsors fall away, with limited opportunity to replace them in the current climate. We remain solvent, and can both pay our bills and invest in development hardware, server infrastructure and, yes, this conference, but we do need to generate new and more regular income to make sure that remains the case. In terms of priority, then, we wait to see if this is the last DevCon for a while. Next up, we had a readout on the experience of our most recent release manager, garbear. Getting Kodi tagged, packaged and released on multiple platforms is a significant undertaking, so even point releases involve a good chunk of work. Even apparently minor changes involve merging new translations, for example, plus there are inevitable rule/eligibility checks on software stores and similar. Indeed, our most recent "Omega" 21.2 release actually included a complete update to the entire add-on ecosystem precisely because of translation issues, which means 100+ separate components needed to be built and released alongside the core Kodi application. Even that caused further ripple effects: we needed to update binary add-ons as well, which then, in turn, caused problems for existing 21.1 installations. This led straight into a more practical conversation, with garbear joined primarily by martijn, yol and lrusak to talk about how we could improve things: APIs, ABIs, links, scripts, dependencies, redistributables, SDKs, implications for different platforms - and, yes, much, much more about translations. Releasing new versions of Kodi is most certainly not a trivial task! This conversation then segued into a long debate about build systems, and the complexity that Kodi brings: there are few, if any, multi-platform applications that use the same code base on quite so many target operating systems. If you think about most other applications that might be available on multiple platforms, the chances are that they use completely different code bases that are then built on specific tools to produce applications that might look similar, and might behave similarly, but are actually very different. Alternatively, you have very many applications that are basically web pages, rendered in a platform-specific wrapper - these can deliver a very consistent experience and rich multimedia, but in a very different way. Kodi doesn't work like that: it's a huge amount of C++ and other code that's custom built to be as consistent as possible across platforms, and, while that resolves very many issues, it also creates some others at the bundling stage on some platforms. A change of direction next: 78andyp joined to talk us through his recent work - and further plans - around Blu-ray support in Kodi. Currently, Kodi supports three disc playback modes: Kodi can show the Blu-ray menu, with all the navigation overhead; you can ask to play the main movie, and Kodi will just take a guess and play the longest media item on the disc, which may or may not be what you want; or you can go into file view, and wander around until you find that the main movie is labelled as item 636 out of a list of ... well, lots. This is obviously all less than ideal, with further implications depending on whether it's a multi-version disc, an episodic series disc, whether there are extras, and so on. Add to this the complexities of ISO versus physical disc, "playlists" with multiple episodes, or initial scraping versus play-time, and there's clearly more to be done - and that's the gauntlet picked up by 78andyp: to make playing a Blu-ray in Kodi as straightforward as playing a media file. This is very much a work-in-progress, but there's a current 3,000-line pull request that aims to at least start this journey, addressing the simple file view for episodes at play-time. And, like so many things, this process is unveiling other side-quests on the way, ranging from NFO support through ranged episodes to library handling - for both Blu-rays and, potentially, DVDs. There's clearly huge potential for much more to come, so watch this space, shiny disc fans! (There was a sidebar conversation during this presentation in which ksooo raised some very valid questions about vision and the natural constraints on Kodi: what are the design principles we are using that ultimately drive what should and shouldn't be included in Kodi versus, say, a media manager, and thus what are the dialogue boxes or other user interactions that are acceptable? Similarly, how effective could a heuristic be, when will it need user intervention, and what should that intervention look like? Does it need some external "priming", or metadata information?). And that's it for Day One - it's late, and dinner calls. We'll be back tomorrow with more, so please, join us then! † Fun fact: Albanian is the only surviving member of the Albanoid group of languages, and so stands alone, with no direct modern relatives. It's the official language of Albania and Kosovo, one of the official languages in North Macedonia and Montenegro, and a widespread minority language in Italy, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Greece. Add in the Albanian diaspora across the Americas, Europe and Oceania, and there are three or four times more native speakers worldwide than there are inhabitants of modern Albania - including singers Dua Lipa and Rita Ora. View the full article

I know I've been slow to respond to this and you've been posting things already, but I am fine with you uploading these. My only stipulation is that I don't want people uploading things that someone else is making available elsewhere. I fully support all content developers and don't want to infringe on their work. But if something is not available elsewhere and the original creator is no longer in a position to offer it online, I don't mind people sharing it here.

I group my PreShows into 2 categories, short and full. For regular movie nights I just have a simple intro and trailers. I try to keep it between 5-10 minutes. For my big movie nights I do something similar to what you described. I try to think of the experience kind of like a chef. The basic PreShow is primarily a palate cleanser. I want to get people ready to leave the world behind and enjoy a movie. The full thing is a multi-course meal, where I want to take people on a journey.

Hey @Quebert . Welcome back. It's always great to hear from people that enjoy PreShow, and the versions prior to it. The conditions were developed by the person before me. An upcoming versions of PreShow will include metadata so that you can display more relevant trivia. The goal is to create the conditions at the content level instead of at the sequence level so that you can use 1 sequence for a wide variety of content. More specifically, the 1st version will look at rating and genres and deliver content that is a better match to your movie. For example, if you are watching an R rated horror movie you won't be getting Pixar trivia, and vice versa. The latest version of PreShow in the repo already includes the 1st version of metadata for video bumpers. I also have options for release year, director and cast to better refine the content, but that will be in development/testing for a long while. Thanks for your post.

0.3.2.1 has been added to the site, which hopefully fixes this issue.

I'll look at it when I get time, after the current dev round is completed. From my perspective, if you are repeating content then you are playing something in the background and it is ok if the music stops and potentially repeats the same music. I would just put some sort of other element in the loop with it so that there more natural flow to it. For example, play the slideshow and then a random short video and then come back to the slideshow. If you want to make this work now the way you described, make copies of your slideshow images and then use bulk rename utility to renumber them. You can figure out how long you want it to be and just add enough files to process that amount of time. I use that utility a lot and really like it.

You should be able to combine it with the command module to make it loop. Let me know if you need help setting that up.

Glad you got it to work.

This setup sounds like a lot of fun. The upcoming versions of PreShow are basically a way to do this exact thing with only 1 sequence. What are you doing to show trailers related to the year of your movie?

To suppress the busy dialog when PreShow Experience is running, add the following to the DialogBusy.xml file: <visible>IsEmpty(Window(Home).Property(script.preshowexperience.running))</visible>If it has a reference to CV in the DialogBusy.xml, change this <visible>String.IsEmpty(Window(Home).Property(script.cinemavision.running))</visible>to this <visible>String.IsEmpty(Window(Home).Property(script.preshowexperience.running))</visible>

This is a Kodi/Shield issue and not directly related to PreShow, so there's nothing I can do within PreShow to fix this. I have my shield set to use a network drive, but will try adding an external drive to it and will report back if I can get it to work.