An improved look and feel for OSMC

Originally published at: An improved look and feel for OSMC - OSMC
Hi, We’ve been working hard to improve the OSMC user experience. This is greatly hinged on the OSMC skin that we ship as the default. We have now updated our skin and taken many of your suggestions on board. The new OSMC skin features mouse support, multiple view layouts for movies, music and TV shows…

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Thanks fine piece of work has been delivered

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Yay…thanks :grin:
gonna test now…

Updated, saw the new skin for a second (with ‘recent’ addons enabled et al.), decided to set menu back to defaults. Screen is now just blue and empty. :frowning: I see the time and date, OSMC logo…thats it.

Tried rebooting and killing the mediacenter service.

Can you upload a log so we can see what’s going on?

which one would you like to see? Is there an aggregated log somewhere on the filesystem? I’d go to the OSMC settings and upload log but I can’t see the menu ;p

Please upload the Kodi.log

Sam

http://paste.osmc.io/usejovizoj.vhdl

the last one did it for me, thank you :smile:

Glad to hear that. I suspect both commands are required, in that order.

New skin looks great, like the “Recent” Movies and ability to do thumbnails etc.

One problem I seemed to have encounter. I can’t add a Video file. I go to Add, click Browse, get to screen that shows the list of available devices/methods - but can’t navigate to any of them. Only choices seems to be OK or Cancel or Up…

This is now the third time that I have had to reinstall release candidate 3. Each time I get an update the osmc crashes on a reboot leaving me looking at a flashing unhappy face. I note that the load text is appearing over the front of the OSMC screen in white text on a black background then goes to the unhappy face. Why do these updates keep crashing the system?

Once I do a reinstall everything works just fine - but the updates should not require me to have to start from scratch each time.

Most likely it’s power issues, do you ever see the rainbow square in the upper right corner of the screen? You may not depending on the PI version. Check voltage with a multimeter at the TPs

Other possibility is a sd card getting flaky

There’s nothing wrong with the update system that would cause what you describe - it works extremely reliably (on hundreds of thousands of devices) and a lot of care and attention has gone into its design and testing.

Almost certainly you have a hardware issue such as one of the following:

  • Faulty SD card
  • Inadequate power supply
  • Too much overclock (try reducing your overclock to default)

(This is not an exhaustive list)

There is a small chance that some additional 3rd party software you’ve installed may cause an issue during upgrades but it’s uncommon.

Anything that causes a crash or file system corruption when writing to disk is going to cause you problems when you upgrade because you are overwriting lots of critical system files during the upgrade process - so any subtle hardware issues you have that might not cause apparent problems during normal operation will tend to show themselves at upgrade time because so many boot critical files are written to disk during an upgrade.

If you see any text being displayed over the OSMC splash image during boot it means an error has occurred during boot, typically a service failing to load - if you could get a photo of this error it would be helpful, although I suspect that the root cause of your problems is going to be disk corruption.

Love the work you’ve done with the interface. Greatly appreciated. Big thank you!
A parentheses regarding RSS-feeds… That feature have never worked for me. Running OSMC on a RaspberryPi B+ the scrolling news-feed haven’t worked before and not in this last release either…
Where should it turn up on the screen? I turn the option on but it doesn’t appear on the screen.

It stills misses the ratings of the movies and episodes. In the confluence skin its right beside de title, here we must go to the “show more info” menu to see the (imdb) rating.

You do realise that not all skins are the same as confluence and provide the same information in the same layout as confluence, right ? :wink:

That’s the whole point of being able to use different skins. Some people like skins that are information dense and packed with features, other people like a clean simple minimalist look without clutter. The OSMC skin definitely leans towards the latter.

If you try out a handful of different skins available in the built in Kodi repository you’ll see that the information shown by different skins varies dramatically - including the amount of metadata shown in the movie listings without going to the information page.

One skin can’t suit everyone, so it may be that a different skin would suit your tastes better - I don’t use the OSMC skin myself and have in the past used Amber, Black Glass Nova, Nebula and now Refocus. All of them are very different from each other.

Yes I know. But the rating is one basic thing, that will not occupy that much of space. It can go to the same line where the genres are presented, for example.

Just installed the latest updates with the new skin.

First impressions, it feels a lot darker than the original. I have to say i preferred the lighter blue with white menu items from before rather than the darker blue/green background and yellow selection colours.

Love that you can see movie art for latest added etc, main menu feels a little cramped on my TV’s though now. I think only showing a few bigger options was better?
Still think having infinity scroll (where pressing down on the bottom item takes you to the top) would be good, seems to be the norm on most things these days.

Like the changes to the MY OSMC addon and menu restructuring

Preferred the previous Movie view that showed you the scrolling description of information about the film under the movie art instead of just showing file information. Although having this info easily accessible is a good idea

I like the new menu bar when you press left arrow on movie items, makes more sense

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