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A Few Chocolate Questions


gat0rjay

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gat0rjay

Hi, long time user - first time poster... With the recent update I found myself enjoying the "Chocolate" gui for the first time. Overall I really like it, and I want to say great job to everyone behind its development (and thanks!)

 

Just a little background on how I use MBC. I have an HTPC in the living room as a settop box replacement (as well as a couple Xbox360's as extenders throughout the house). Although I have a mouse/keyboard available at the main HTPC, I don't like to have to use them if I can use the remote instead (WAF is an issue). Now a couple questions.

  1. In the new Chocolate gui, is there any way to "click" on a Director and/or Genre (as you're able to with Cast - and how you are able to in the Classic theme) to show all titles in the entire library with those tags?
    • *I know you can sort by Director/Genre by indexing a folder that way - however, this only searches the folder/section you're in, and not the entire library. And further, I find it quite a bit more combersome to change the index of an entire folder when all I want to do is quickly see other films by a certain director (this is also true with the genre sort, to a lesser extent). I do like the feature, and the idea, that you can index an entire library by these different criteria; however I would still really like the option of the "Classic" way where you could just click the Director or Genre links from within the description page of a title. In practice, I find it far more quick and useful to be able to just scroll down to a movie with the director/genre I want - IE LOTR, and click "Peter Jackson" and/or "Fantasy" (for genre) - and with one click on the director have it show me all of the PJ films I have - or all of the media titles with "Fantasy" as a genre.  Any chance I'm just overlooking this functionality in Chocolate? If not, any chance it will be making a comeback? If these "clickable" links can't be added to the description area any more, any chance of adding extra pages/sections to the "Cast" item for other sortable tags like: Director/Producer/Studio/Genre/etc?
  2. I see the x/5 Star rankings in the upper left of the description page. Is there any way to make this a numerical TMDB, IMDB, and/or Rotten Tomatoes score instead?
  3. In the Classic theme there used to be media detail information - ie, video and audio bitrates, containers, formats, etc. Any option somewhere to re-enable this? I know some of it was redundent, but I enjoyed having it - it was sometimes useful in deciding whether or not to play a title on an extender, plus just fun to see.
  4. If using vertical scroll, it's difficult to get to the "control panel" in the upper right. Is there any hotkey and/or WMC remote button that will take you to the control panel?

 

Besides these couple of questions I think the new Chocolate interface is fantastic. Keep up the good work.

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1 - Not right now but probably in the future

2 - The star rating is a graphical representation of the tmdb numerical rating. 4 1/2 stars = a rating of 9.

3 - I've tried to keep the interface clean so a lot of this nitty-gritty detail isn't there.  Maybe on some other page or slide out at some future time.

4 - That's why vertical scroll is a bad paradigm with these designs and not the standard.  It makes it very hard to have reserved areas of the screen you can quickly navigate to.

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gat0rjay

4 - That's why vertical scroll is a bad paradigm with these designs and not the standard.  It makes it very hard to have reserved areas of the screen you can quickly navigate to.

 

Hey, thanks so much for the quick and informative reply. Regarding #4, I certainly understand why vertical scroll is problematic regarding the situation I described. I would personally love to use horizontal scroll (I would prefer it actulaly) - except that when switching to horizontal scroll the titles are still alphabetized by row (when logically (to me), it seems they should be alphabetized by column instead). Am I missing a setting for this somewhere?

 

For example, you may have 3 rows in a horizontal scroll setup. Let's say you have 1,000 titles in the collection. Row 1 will have 333 titles beginning with A through G, then row 2, 333 titles beginning with H through Q, and row 3 will be R-Z... My issue is that by doing it this way, at any given point I may have a bunch of titles on Row1 starting with "A", a bunch on Row2 starting with "H", and a bnuch of row 3 starting with "R"...

 

  • Row1 AAAAAAAAAAA Titles
  • Row2 HHHHHHHHHHH Titles
  • Row3 RRRRRRRRRR TItles

wheras if the horizontal scroll was sorted by column it would be like:

 

  • AAAABBCCDDD  etc
  • AAABBBCCDDE
  • AAABBBCDDDE

 

  The reason I use vertical scroll is because since it's alphabetized by row, all the titles on my screen at any given point are in order (as shown above, if I use horizontal, they're not). If there was a way to alphabetize correctly using horizontal I would do it. And/or maybe a hotkey or WMC button could be invoked (ctrl-C, or one of the WMC color buttons red/green/yellow/blue) to get to the control panel.

 

Anyway, just my take. I love the program, and thanks again for all of your work, it's much appreciated.

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Horizontal scrolling works the way you describe in your second example...

 

Actually it would be like this:

 

1  5  9 ...

2  6 10

3  7 11

4  8 12

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gat0rjay

Horizontal scrolling works the way you describe in your second example...

 

Actually it would be like this:

 

1  5  9 ...

2  6 10

3  7 11

4  8 12

 

Thanks for the info. For some reason I could've sworn it was still by row when I tested it earlier. Anyway, sorry for somehow overlooking that obvious info.

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Disorganise

Hi,

 

maybe I'm missing something too then....

I enabled the chocolate theme to have a look and found that my TV shows are vertically scrolling - I couldn't find a setting to switch it to something else so I went back to classic which is nice and simple.

 

My example in chocolate was select NCIS -

all season 8 episodes are listed on the left (because I haven't deleted them yet) so to get to season 9 I have to scroll through 8 which is inefficient.

 

In classic, I go to NCIS and the seasons are horizontally tiled (empty ones hidden so only 8, 9 and 10 show) - one click to the right to highlight 9, select and I'm defaulted to the first unwatched episode with the watched ones horizontally to my left and the unwatched to my right.   I like this arrangement and wonder if there's a setting in chocolate to make it act this way?

 

Alternatively, can I select somewhere to show only unwatched shows, then when I go into NCIS I'll only see season 9 and 10 anyway and the 'top' of list will be the one I want.

 

thanks

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That is not the same vertical scrolling he's talking about.  That is a specialized TV view.  You can collapse the individual seasons to make the scrolling the same as if they weren't all in the same view.  

 

Also, it should automatically position you at the first un-watched episode if you select that option in the config page.

 

Finally, if you really don't like the specialized TV view (but you really should try it with the scroll to first unwatched option) you can disable it in the Chocolate Views config panel.

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I'm gonna need a picture of what you are talking about with movies.  There are a ton of different possible view choices available.  I'm guessing you have the "Strip" view selected as that is the only one that shows just one at a time.  Press the cog wheel and you will get a further menu of all kinds of options.  The View menu on this sub-menu then has all the different view choices that you can choose.

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Disorganise

ok, I installed MBC on my PC and the defaults were the same as the mediacentre PC.  3D movies in coverflow and other movies (two collections) in strip.  Thanks to the joys of having a mouse I could click around a bit faster than stuffing around with the remote and found the option to change view.   I concede, it looks pretty good now - you should think about making it the default :P

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