I’m a long time multi-device user with library sharing via mysql and fstab mounted NFS movie folders. All be working sweetly for many months with 3 X Vero4K in the house (much MUCH better then all the faffing around I used to do trying to get Raspberry Pis to work properly, but that’s another story).
My prime niggle at the the moment is when I stop watching part way through on one device and pick up on another, the resume point is correct however the GUI doesn’t reflect what I’ve been watching. I therefore have to go and find the movie again then resume, rather thank must bring able to resume from in progress movies on the home screen.
I seem to recall there was some discussion around this a few years ago. Does anyone know if there was any progress on addressing it please? I’m currently using Estuary as I’m an old fashioned kind of guy.
I think this is pretty much skin specific whether there is a ‘currently watching’ menu/widget on the home screen. So if Estuary is your favourite skin it would probably be best to put in a feature request with the Estuary devs.
The default web interface has a ‘now watching’ menu which is what I usually use.
Is “now watching” the same as “in progess”, or just similar? Estuary has “in progress” (which I assume is a widget) but it only updates when you reboot, or stop watching something (anthing on that system, but that system only).
It would be great if coming out of the screensaver would force refresh of the screen but you can just click on any video on the main screen to play it, click stop, and then your movie should show up how you want. It is a bit of a kludge but it works and may be faster than digging though the movie list.
Indeed yes, that would be quite helpful. That play and stop kludge is how I’ve been working around it. I just thought that maybe things had moved on and I was missing a trick. The default OSMC skin seems no better in this regard by the way.
I took a clue from the post that fzinken linked to and I think I found a working solution. I only tested this on Win10 to make sure it worked so it is a ‘at your own risk’ if you give it a go. I wanted to trigger only coming out of screensaver as to not make any unnecessary traffic to the database.
add-on>Install from repository>services>Kodi Callbacks
Open tha Kodi Callbacks add-on and click on configure
Set ‘task’ to “builtin”, and the Kodi built in function to “ReloadSkin()” (without the quotes)
In the ‘event’ section you will set it to “On screensaver deactivated” then click OK to save your changes.
Note: I set my screensaver to 1 min for testing and noticed that it kicked me out of the settings page I was in when I came out of the screensaver and it reloaded the skin. I tried setting the ‘refractory period’ to make it only refresh if had only been activated last over a longer period of time. This caused the screensaver to be forced on until the time set in the refractory period. As such I think that setting needs to stay at -1.
If you decide to test this please come back with some feedback after using it for a while.
Update: Since the way this is refreshing the landing page is a reload of the skin it will cause you to return to whatever the previous main screen after the screensaver. If you are a person that uses something like a 5 min dim in your normal use case this might be a bit annoying. If this is only being used with a screensaver time where it only kicks off after a period of time where you really are not using the machine then it should solve the issue. You can set the screensaver to 1 min and play with it and it should be pretty clear what i’m talking about if you leave different information windows open.
Thank you for your work exploring this darwindesign. Even before testing this out myself, I predict that in my use case I’d be frequently be dumped back to the main screen which would get real annoying real quick. I’d get most of the benefit with less of the drawback if the skin would refresh when the display is (re)connected to the device - i.e. turning on the TV or switch from terestrial reception to Vero on HDMI - CEC?
…or failing that a simple button press on the remote to force a skin refresh. Actually that might be even better as then I could itengrate it to my liking via a learning remote such as a Harmony.
Reloading the skin does not dump you back to the main landing page. If you have something like an informational window open the reload will close that and drop you back to the screen you pulled that screen up from. I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned this as most people probably wouldn’t even notice and I apparently made it sound worse than it is. This method should only take a couple minutes to setup and if you don’t like it you can dump it even faster. I suspect if you actually test it you will find it takes care of your problem seamlessly.
That add-on allows for other triggers to be set. I don’t think the UI has any access to CEC state change information but the screen saver is very close to the functional equivalent for most people.
Another manual method not mentioned is to select Reload Skin on the power menu popup. Not sure its available on all skins.
This post reminds me I did hack together an application a while back to sync individual libraries across multiple kodi devices. Part of its features was to automatically update the GUI. I’ll try to dig it out and if its simple I’ll modify for shared library and share it.