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[cmhardwick]

Sorry, work has had me really hopping (new locations opening, etc). I haven't had a chance to really dig into it. I like the idea of the format change if xLobby will support BMP.

Maybe this weekend.

[thekochs]

Hey, I am running TT v2.5 and I cannot get this to work. I have the SPLASH screen surpressed via the Registry HideSplash DWORD. I've put my custom background.bmp image in both the D&C\All Users\App Data\TT 2.0\Data folder as Andrew said on TT Forum.....even put in Program Files folder where TT EXE is....no go. My BMP is a former JPEG that I just renamed to background.bmp. When I run Windows viewer it comes up fine and even shows BMP when I highlight in Windows Explorer. The image is 1024x768 at 156KB in size. Do I need to convert somehow to BMP....like open in PaintShop Pro and save as BMP ?

Thoughts ?

Thanks.

[cmhardwick]

turn off the splash screen supression. TT will substitute the background.bmp file for the normal splash screen I believe.

[thekochs]

turn off the splash screen supression. TT will substitute the background.bmp file for the normal splash screen I believe.

Oh.....so you still have the TT Logo after the BMP file which replaces the SPLASH (in other words the small box which has software version info, license info, etc.) ? I thought the BMP replaced the TT "logo" ? The reason I ask is because of the below comment from Andrew.

http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9983

Yesterday, 09:37 PM
TheaterTek
Administrator Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Atlanta, GA
Posts: 3,767

Yes, the splash is what appears on launch. The background.bmp file lives in the TheaterTek Data folder and will replace the TT logo used as a background/screensaver. If you want it to move, keep it small enough to bounce around the screen.

Note: In 2.5 the location of the Data folder moved, as per the release notes.

Andrew

[cmhardwick]

My bad

I believe you will actually have to open the jpg file in an editor and resave it as an actual bmp file to work. Just changing the name won't because regardless of the name, it's still a jpg file.

This works on my machine, version 2.4.1.4. Running with /nosplash it will come up with the background.bmp file on the screen.

[cmhardwick]

I was also able to get this automated using a small batch file and a free software from LEAD software that allows commandline image file conversions. I'll upload details tonight. This would only work reliably, I would think, on a fast network and fast machine. The event to do this is OS/Execute file, passing along the image parameter (i believe it is, from the Movies database). This is executed as the first step in the "play movies" event.

basically, the batch file deletes the existing background.bmp file from the theatertek directory, calls the conversion program which converts the coverart file and puts the converted file in the theatertek directory. then it renames this file to background.bmp (you can't rename with this conversion program). AFter that, the other steps in the event run (close overlay, clear playlist, launch theatertek, etc). This worked consistently on my system so when I clicked PLAY movie, the theatertek screen opened on my other monitor with the coverart from the movie, then the movie loaded and started playing.

Not especially clean, but it works for me.

[thekochs]

My bad

I believe you will actually have to open the jpg file in an editor and resave it as an actual bmp file to work. Just changing the name won't because regardless of the name, it's still a jpg file.

This works on my machine, version 2.4.1.4. Running with /nosplash it will come up with the background.bmp file on the screen.

Where did you put the background.bmp ? Is it in Data folder or TT2.0 folder where EXE is ?
FYI...if you upgrade to v2.5 the DATA folder has moved to D&C/All Users/Application Data/TT2.0. The other will still show in Program Files/blah..blah but is ignored in v2.5. Andrew has in the release notes on thread but alot of people are missing it.

[thekochs]

I was also able to get this automated using a small batch file and a free software from LEAD software that allows commandline image file conversions. I'll upload details tonight. This would only work reliably, I would think, on a fast network and fast machine. The event to do this is OS/Execute file, passing along the image parameter (i believe it is, from the Movies database). This is executed as the first step in the "play movies" event.

basically, the batch file deletes the existing background.bmp file from the theatertek directory, calls the conversion program which converts the coverart file and puts the converted file in the theatertek directory. then it renames this file to background.bmp (you can't rename with this conversion program). AFter that, the other steps in the event run (close overlay, clear playlist, launch theatertek, etc). This worked consistently on my system so when I clicked PLAY movie, the theatertek screen opened on my other monitor with the coverart from the movie, then the movie loaded and started playing.

Not especially clean, but it works for me.

Very cool........would like to see the details of this.....your batch.....explanation of events in XL, strings, etc.

FYI...I posted this in TT new feature forum....giving you credit. I think TT could make this much easier with one command line parameter. http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9989

Thanks !

[cmhardwick]

The background.bmp is in the exe directory (in my case C:\program files\theatertek\theatertek dvd 2.0)

Well, the conversion will have to be done as most of us have coverart as JPG files and TT requires a BMP file. It's a very quick process and on my way into work this morning I realized I was doing something very stupid that actually made it harder on myself hehehe. Now if I just remember what I thought of when I get home tonight

As for the command line parameter, it would be nice if it could look for coverart in the directory and use it, but that would only work from the harddrives, not from actual DVDs most likely. (and again you've got the same issue of file format).

I'll post the details tonight (batch file, event specs, etc).

[cmhardwick]

Here's the batch file: (save this as copyfile.bat in the xlobby directory)

Code: Select all

@echo off
del "C:\Program Files\TheaterTek\TheaterTek DVD 2.0\background.bmp"
cd \leadcmd\bin
c:\leadcmd\lfc %1 "C:\Program Files\TheaterTek\TheaterTek DVD 2.0" /f6 /noui
ren "c:\Program Files\TheaterTek\TheaterTek DVD 2.0\folder.bmp" background.bmp
rem pause

My batch file is in my xlobby directory, for convenience. Edit the theatertek directory name to match the location on your machine

The leadcmd software can be downloaded for free from here: http://www.leadtools.com/evaldownloads/FreeUtils/LEADCommandLineutils.exe
install this accepting the defaults

The command I added to the PLAY MOVIE event is OS/EXECUTE FILE

File = c:\program files\xlobby\copyfile.bat
Arguments = "%movies>coverart%" (The quotes are necessary to allow for the spaces in most movie titles)
Working Directory = c:\leadcmd\bin
Window Type = minimized

Add this command as the first one under play movie and the file should be there when theatertek launches.

Note!! This will only work in this format if the coverart in your movie directorie's is called folder.jpg. If you are pointing to the randomly numbered images from DVD-Profiler, it won't work (in the current version, I'll work on that).

Good luck

I'm going to work on coding this better as a script like tswhite's intheaters script, but that will be a while. in the mean time, this works

[thekochs]

This is great but quick question.....awhile back I stopped getting the .jpg files of the coverart since I'm using DVD Profiler. XL points to this and I upload in the XL Config from the DVD Profiler export XML database. My DVDs are in this type........

{hdd}:\{movie name}\IFO & VOBs.

I used to have JPGs there when I used myHTPC & Meedio.

Anyway, my question is where does DVD Profiler keep the JPEGs and are they named in any convention ? You got me thinking if we could point to that directory....or somehow the XML database ?

[homepc]

DVD Profiler stores the images in a folder called IMAGES in the DVD Profiler Directory. These images are not very user friendly. The images names are just numbers.

[cmhardwick]

I manually copy the appropriate coverart jpg to the individual movie folders and rename it to folder.jpg. I find the correct movie cover by simply opening windows explorer in thumbnail view so I can see the images. There has been talk of someone writing a script that would read the xml export file and do this automatically, but I haven't seen anything on it. I'll have to dig into scripting (been along time since I've done programming or scripting) to see if I can come up with something. It will be a long time though as I completely new to dealing with xml databases.

[S Pittaway]

i was board and thought this might look good, i already add a plugin which i used to resize all of my covers (it ensures that the image aspect ratios are correct fot movies/cd covers), so i modded it so it could create a bitmap copy of another file....

the command of interest is
"xCoverResize:make bmp*src file*dst file*width*height"

I used the following and it looks ok
"xCoverResize:make bmp*%movies>coverart%*C:\Program Files\TheaterTek\TheaterTek DVD 2.0\background.bmp*200*300"


If any one fancies a copy of the plugin stick an email address on here and i will forward it on...

[thekochs]

I manually copy the appropriate coverart jpg to the individual movie folders and rename it to folder.jpg. I find the correct movie cover by simply opening windows explorer in thumbnail view so I can see the images. There has been talk of someone writing a script that would read the xml export file and do this automatically, but I haven't seen anything on it. I'll have to dig into scripting (been along time since I've done programming or scripting) to see if I can come up with something. It will be a long time though as I completely new to dealing with xml databases.

Thought.....instead of doing the real-time conversion would it not be easier to copy the movie cover art JPEG to the DVD Moive folder....covert it then to BMP and name it background.bmp ? Thus each {hdd}:\{DVD Movie}\{IFO & VOB} has a BMP called background.bmp. Then it would just be a copy/replace to C:\Program Files\TT 2.0\ to get it to show on launch ?