Matt

<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.

I've fixed that bug in the next version, which should be coming out in a couple days. Also, that bug only related to IMDB trailers. Matt Huisman's Youtube for Trailers addon only affects the YT and Kodi trailers.

Do you use images or videos for your ratings?

There's only 1 thing in my theater that I haven't thought about replacing, so I think that has to win by default. My favorite thing is my popcorn machine.

Excluding PreShow, what is your favorite kodi addon?

It worked great for me out of the box, so I'm not sure what the issue is. What system are you running kodi on? What is your internet speed on that system? I would first try lowering the quality settings and see if there is a level that it loads faster. Also, what trailers are you loading, kodi or tmdb?

Gotcha. The videos can't overlap easily. I think there's a way to do it, but it would require a lot of steps outside of Preshow and isn't something I know how to do. My recommendation to create that sort of the experience is to make a title slide or theater/feature intro and edit the curtain transition in with that so that you have that video play and fade to black and then the movie starts.

What type of curtains do you have?

Excluding the actual hardware for your media (screen, speakers, amps, receivers, etc.) what is your favorite thing that enhances your movie watching experience?

Why did you choose the ADX Maximus? I've often thought about bass shakers, but have never been able to settle on what to get. I mostly see Dayton Audio now. Also, what do you power them with?

Glad you got it working. Agreed. I think I also messed it up the 1st time. I got the other YT addon configured properly multiple times and it still broke at some point. There have been some issues with the YouTube for Trailers addon, but Matt has always fixed them and it wasn't something that I had to bang my head against the wall trying to figure out what wasn't working. That's good advice for any addon. There are some things that Kodi doesn't recognize at the initial install, and that will only work after a restart. There are a few things in PreShow that are affected by this also.

If you want the best quality for youtube trailers, please use Matt Huisman's YouTube for Trailers addon. It is a drop in replacement for the standard YouTube addon. It doesn't provide access to youtube, but with a $5 yearly donation you can get the highest quality youtube trailers without all the hassle of the API. I'm in no way affiliated with him, just a fan of his work.

Trailers work. I was just testing them earlier today. Have you updated your content? What trailer source are you using? Share a log and I'll try to help. To share a log, close out of Kodi and then reopen it. Play the sequence where you are having the issue or preview the trailer module. 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.

What gear are you most excited about when you watch a home movie?

Thanks for sending the log. I'll review it and discuss it with you via PM.