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[jb82]

Be nice to have an option for Gaussian blur backdrops of the selected media item in theatre view (including all media - music album covers/video covers/photos/file thumbnails etc.). 100 pixel radius works well.

Example of the sort of thing I mean:
https://i.redd.it/p56kk5nu54xy.jpg


It's a very nice way of making the background look coherent when browsing, viewing media details/playing now etc. Be easy to add into the Theatre View\Theme\backdrop options too. If this is possible on a phone, then I'm sure it's light work for a PC.

[Hendrik]

Bluring the background image wouldn't be hard, but I wonder if this would actually look good. On a TV you see a lot of the background in many views, unlike on your phone example where the majority is covered by UI.

[jb82]

It's not simply blurring a static background image. The process is to enlarge cover art (or thumbnail) to full size/stretched then apply a radical Gaussian blur.

The end result is much like a fade effect background that's used for all sorts of large-screen visuals (ppt slides etc. etc.), but the key is that because the colours are from the focused source, it's coordinated. I believe Spotify and Plex use this 'trick' for their TV interfaces.

I was able to try it for audio cover-flow/playing now etc. in MC and it looked very good - much better than the alternative of either a static background or fan art that's not colour coordinated in anyway and far too busy/distracting.

Unfortunately, this is a bit of a pain to do in Theatre View
- Create the blurred backdrops for every cover – could be batch processed I guess
– Place the jpg in the album folder,
- Enable media slideshow in themes and disable all online content sources.
 
There are several downsides – one is that if you store Folder.jpg (or any pic file in a recognised format for that matter) in the album folder it includes that as a backdrop and cycles between them as a slideshow (which looks terrible and defeats the object of having a specific ‘backdrop.jpg’).

This setting combination also doesn’t work at all for video files. This has been reported and discussed many times but never resolved.

Plus, even if fixed/implemented for video files, it wouldn’t work for thumbnails/photos where there isn’t a containing folder for every file as such.

[dgm1960]

Blurred backgrounds look very good on large sceens. The Apple TV OS has this has a feature as does Plex. In fact, the newer Kodi skins feature blurred backgrounds via a plugin. It is a very nice effect.

[jb82]

I think they look brilliant.

Attached is an example of how the playing now screen looks with an enlarged and blurred version of the cover as the backdrop. This is with the image/video mix set to strong - MC still darkens it slightly - it would look even better if it was possible to disable the darkening effect altogether for backdrops (it's not needed for blurred backgrounds).

As a starter for 10 I'd just be happy if there was an option in theatre view to use Backdrop.jpg (or some equivalent naming convention) for applying a specific backdrop to albums and videos. The current implementation is obviously capable of using image files in the containing folder so I can't imagine this is a massive development effort?