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[sirganty]

So I've noticed it's possible to access cover art images etc using MCWS calls directly from <Picture> elements in the skin definition.

This almost opens up the possibility to add things like Last Played or Recently Imported onto the root page.

When I say almost, it is tantalisingly close, but not close enough to be functional.

Obviously the only service calls that work are those that return an image; Browse/Image and File/getImage.

This in itself would be fine, and an excellent start to enriching the theater view experience, if only there was a way to determine some File IDs to pass in, or if the calls could be made using a some other identifier; maybe path or name.

I've looked into creating some smart lists which can be used purely for this purpose, and then finding the ID using webgizmo and hardcoding them in.
Unfortunately it seems that these IDs change each time the media server starts.

I've also investigated the possibility of url redirection; pointing the <picture> element at local html page that dynamically determines the id and redirects to the MCWS image output I am looking for, but it doesn't seem to work in theater view, even when the page does in IE.

The only other thing I can think of is to extend the MCWS system

a) Extending the Browse/Image function for a playlist, passing in a "playlist path"; this could work if the smartlists are set up correctly.

b) Creating new function calls for the things I'm looking for.


Is there anyway to extend the MCWS service myself without having to create an entirely new webservice?

Does anyone else have any possible ways this could work?

I suppose I could create a script that uses the command line tool to save down the images into the skin folder
But it's pretty ugly, and it would then need to be scheduled to run pretty regularly to keep the images up to date.

[sirganty]

Really I think the best solution would be to extend MCWS/Browse/Image to allow querying via something other than &id (which is hard to track down without the ability to traverse a hierarchy i.e. in the case of direct urls from theater view)

My personal preference would be &path; such as "audio\recent" or "playlists\recently imported"

and then have a few extra options from there:

The default would be as is; if the library item contains only one image return it, if it contains more than one return the "stacked" image.

alternatively supply &index=n; to return a single image with index n from the ordered list returned by the path
for example &path=audio\recent&index=0 would return the one most recently added audio item's cover art.

or

another parameter which returns a "wall" of cover art for all the child elements of the &path rather like the wall list style but as a single image.



What would also be pretty fantastic would be the ability to "redraw" the image, and optionally include some overlaid text; I'm thinking name, date imported, date played etc
although I fully expect this to be extremely painful to make configurable enough to be worthwhile, so would be happy enough with just the top ones

[Matt]

It's an interesting idea, but things aren't really setup to allow MCWS usage from Theater View skins.  I think it's going to be difficult to get great results.

[sirganty]

as I say, I think just cover art would be a good enough start to be worthwhile, but I would need to be able to access it using something other than library item id as theatre view doesn't have any capability to construct the hierarchy

How hard would it be to add path as a query parameter to Browse/Image to allow use as I have suggested e.g {audio\recent} or {playlists\playlist name}?

[ivb]

Ever get anywhere with this?

I have some thoughts about Theater View, very similar to this in concept, but if you've already determined it to be a non-option then I won't waste my time.