Confluence - Create Custom Menu Item - Is this best practice?

Help and Support
1

Hi

I would like to add a custom menu item to my confluence skin, linked to a directory.

My goal is to separate content at the main menu.

Kids Movies linked to /media/wdpidrive/kidsmovies
Docos linked to /media/wdpidrive/documentaries
Movies linked to /media/wdpidrive/movies

Preferably I would like to retain the confluence skin.

Does anyone know if the post below represents current ‘best practice’?

Cheers, Geoff

2

Confluence is a Kodi skin. You should be asking here Kodi Community Forum - Skins Support

OSMC has no bearing on such functions.

1 Like
3

To be honest, the longer term solution is to find a skin that allows custom menu entries without xml hacking. Let someone else worry about keeping the xml up to kodi standards. You will also be able to get updates for that skin that wont break your hack.

4

thanks, yeah I hear that the Amber skin is quite OK for this requirement. Cheers, Geoff.

5

Just add each folder separately as a video source, that’ll do what you want.

6

Geoff, I did mange to get it to work. My only hassle is that every time I update OSMC the home.xml gets over written and I have to replace it with a back up. Karnage is right it is easier to find a skin that allows you to do this out of the box. If you really want proceed with Confluence mail me and I will tell you how.

7

I still think my suggestion would work.

Add a source called Movies and a menu item called Movies will appear. Add another source called Kids Movies and a second menu item called Kids Movies will appear.

Is there something I’m missing?

8

Confluence doesn’t work like that (and I’m not aware of any skin that does). It’s true that when you add a movie source and scan it to your library, the Movies entry on the home screen will appear - but that’s based on library content and not on specific sources that have been added.

The choices ultimately are:-

  • Modify the Confluence xml to add your custom menu entries. Back up your changes and re-apply every time the Confluence skin is updated
  • Using the Krypton version of Confluence, there’s limited support for editing the submenu’s via library nodes - Customisable home submenus
  • Use one of the Confluence forks that support custom home screen entries - Xonfluence seems consistently recommended
  • Use another skin that supports custom home screen entries - Amber has already been identified, and has expanded choices for home menu entries in it’s Krypton test version (rather than having to add any new entries to favourites)

But, as said, this isn’t really an OSMC issue, and you’re likely to find more experience on this issue on the Kodi forums.

1 Like
9

Ah, so Movies comes from the ‘type’ and not the ‘name’. I see, my mistake. unfortunately my folder is called movies, I call the datasource movies and the type is (you guessed it) movies so I wasn’t sure where this was coming from.

1 Like
10

hi Chaps

Thanks for suggestions. Been trying various options here, and my experience might be of some use.

I haven’t been able to get it to work the way I wanted, which is for the kids to be able to select ‘Kids Movies’ and not see ‘adult’ movies. (such as unfortunate term ;)).

This can be done, but ONLY if you don’t scan movies from both sources (kids and adults) because they all end up on the same DB, will I’ve found lists kids movies in ‘adults’ section and vice versa.

The best way I found of doing it is not to scan kids movies, but to create menu item which just displays file name, and then by identifying ‘adult’ movies as movies scrape / scan these so they end up with a nice library feel (description, year, pics etc).

I’ll keep exploring whether there is an add-on which can separate these 2 folders and keep them separate in the DB.

Cheers, Geoff.

11

Hey Geoff,

been a long time but I’m trying to do something similar with two separate lists of films - ones I’ve seen and ones I’ve yet to watch. I want them both to appear in separate menu items on Confluence but I also want to scrape both so we get full info etc

Did you find a way to do it with your kids and adult films?

Thanks

-Mat

12

If you go to the slideout menu there is an option to switch the video views between all, watched, and unwatched. It is even possible to map a remote button to this function if one desires.

13

Thanks Darwindesign, but that only works if your ‘watched’ and ‘unwatched’ flags are used correctly - mine aren’t.

What I need is a way of having two separate directories of films as two separate ‘buttons’ on the main menu. Both as a separate list and both being scraped.

I don’t think it’s possible since as soon as I scrape they both end up in the same list

14

Are you moving your films do a different directory after you watch them? Sorry but i’m a bit confused on what sounds like an unusual method of managing your content. If you have two folders that you are scraping in and want to have the content from one of them set was watched then after you scrape it in you can go to the “videos” section and context menu on that folder and select mark as watched. This will set every item stored in that folder individually as watched.

15

That’s exactly what we do - once we’ve watched the full rip I compress them down using Handbrake to save space in case we want to watch later and also so they can be easily watched by the kids remotely via plex. These go in a different directory.