Simple How to for using TViXie2Playon!HD to generate a great Jukebox experience...

Some remarks:

I am just a simple user so I will not be able to answer all kinds of technical questions, I just thought this weekend more people would like to play with TViXie on their PlayonHD like I will be doing.

My Jukebox holds op to 112 movies, no problems so far!

Once generated using TViXiE2Playon!HD you can still edit the movie info since all TViXie generated content is being saved to files using the same names in each folder. So playing with a Template can be done in already generated a Jukebox.

You can change the background of your main menu by editing Background.jpg in the Jukebox folder

hmmm...tried it but didn't work
It only shows empty boxes, no cover art. And it won't let me play any movies

As mentioned I am no techie. But following the steps in the How to worked for me. The omly help I can really offer is to copy my own Jukbox. I have attached the Movie test jukebox which workes for me.

Just copy attached zip to your Playon!

The files Avatar.mp4 and Astro Boy.avi are empty (off course) so you could should replace them with your own (or use other movies renamed to Avatar.mp4 and Astro Boy.avi for testing purposes).

Then open the Jukebox (dont refresh/reload) and if this one also doesn't work then there is a difference in out Playon's if it does you've got a working test Jukebox from which you can derive where things go wrong in your own setup.

Good Luck, Hope this helps!

ok.. first install TViXiE from http://www.tvixie.com/download/TViXiE-1.3.1-setup.zip.. duh

Your sample works great and the movie overview is fantastic looking. Mine is not working but I made changes to my template because I did not like the quality of the thumbnails and thus the inserted cover within the movie overview. I chose to not use the generated ones by Tvixie that it downloads but use the existing folder(cover) and backdrops(fan art) I have inside of the Peggie V1 template. They looked much nicer when downsized from 1000 x 1500 than the 170 x 210 thumbnails. So I deselected downloading cover and fan art. Therefore Tvixie did not create the two additional files - fanart.tvixie and front_cover.tvixie for each folder.

I will change this, and rebuild my library when I get home and see how it looks. The individual movie overview should not change at all since that is created using the template and I have it directed to my existing files for those image pieces. I was dissapointed with the image quality on your sample thumbnails (created by Tvixie) so I will try to play with the image quality of the two .tvixie files as well to see if I can clear it up. Might have to create a script to create those two files myself from existing ones - if it is possible to have larger sizes in the PlayOn!HD jukebox.

I am also using the 1080P HTPC setting and a template sized to 1080p.


Here is your 720 built background using the internal Tvixie made cover thumbnail as an insert,




And here is the one generated using raw original folder files that Tvixie shrinks to fit the space,




Notice the details for the lettering and overall look for the cover insert.

This is a huge step forward though and it is amazing. No need to rely on builtin skins in the firmware. We can customize the movie overview anyway we want. The multiple movie preview can probably be skinned almost as easily but with the template editor built into Tvixie it is a breeze.

@ Matt/Seattle

Thanx for the advice. I will definitly be upscaling my jukebox files!

Good thing my weekend started, two whole days of tweaking ahead

Copied your testfolder to my HD and low and behold....works like a charm.
Now I need to figure out why it won't work for my own movies.

Thats gonna be fun

Did a rework of the jukebox, but still no luck.
No idea why it won't work for me.

I follow the instructions, but to no avail

Running the Tvixie fetcher right now.

I actually use an additional media fetcher before I use the Tvixie one. The first one is Media Center Master which is a fetcher that outputs for a Windows Media Center plugin called MediaBrowser. It outputs metadata in an xml format similar to XBMC. It gets my video drive on my computer looking like this,



I then sync this HDD to an identically sized one in my PlayOn!HD over Fast Ethernet. The drive in my PlayOn!HD is the one which I run the Tvixie against. I did not originally have all my files in their own folders and it would have been a pain to do it manually. Luckily I found this software that did everything for me with out hassles in a few seconds, AVI mover. I actually used a slightly different one but I have used this one as well. Should work for any extension.

Couple things I would make sure of Frandaman if you have not already:

1. Make sure you use a HTPC for the model type.
2. Make sure you hit cancel when the PlayOn!HD asks you to update the jukebox.
3. Make sure the files are in their final position where the PlayOn!HD will read them from when runnning both Tvixie and the TvixietoPlayOn!HD software. I think it would matter.

I'll update post in a moment to say if I am successful.

Edit:
Already ran into an issue. It appears that Tvixie scans the template you select and if that is no mention of frontcover.tvixie or fanart.tvixie in it, it will not fetch that data nor create those two files. And when it does do those it replaces my folder.jpg with the 147x200 pixel frontcover sized jpg. Might have to run the fetcher twice - once to create the necessary .tvixie files and another to update the media overview. Or write a script to take my large folder.jpg and create the front_cover.tvixie which is 270x400. Not sure if the fanart.tvixie is required yet. Still testing.

Edit2:
Not sure if the Tvixie2PlayonHD even uses the .tvixie files if you do not select them in options. Changed to standard 1080p builtin template to see if that is the issue.

Did you use the base HTPC 720p template?

Edit3:
I think I figured it out as being a simple path issue. Here is your working code for a jukebox entry:


And here is what mine looks like:


I think it has to do with me not mapping the hard drive to a letter and just selecting the location over the network like this:

Yep.

That is the problem. The path is being put incorrectly into the rss files. I manually changed one to the correct way and that background came up just fine when I pulled it up. I still can not get the tvixie2playonHD program to create the correct pathway though. I think I am selecting the folder incorrectly maybe - still using network path instead of z drive. That must be it.

Good news though is that I can forget the .tvixie files and just use my native ones - at least a resized one for the cover art anyway. Will have to experiment. The conversion program that creates the jukebox does not even care about any of the tvixie created metadata or files. If you have a background (fan art), cover, and completed background with metadata it will use whatever you point it at. Tvixie is really only creating the completed background with metadata jpg for us. It also acts as a fetcher as well of course.