Getting Started With GemStone

[Tiki]

I've looked through a lot of threads here in the Gemstone subforum, but haven't really seen a detailed getting started guide. Many questions are addressed in the stickies, but I didn't find answers to these questions that I have:

1. This may seem obvious, but does Gemstone automatically handle obtaining fanart and metadata, or does it just display what it finds? Or, do I need to install a separate plugin (BMT, Complemtary Metadata, etc.) to handle scanning and obtaining this info?
2. Does Gemstone have a way to display weather maps?
3. If I create a custom flow, is there a way to hide repeat airings? The Malore menus can do this (it's useful if creating a flow to show upcoming movies sorted by title and you don't want it to list the same movie 10 times in a row, for example).
4. If I create a custom flow based on Dual Flow, is there a way to sort the left column in reverse order? Example: Upcoming Movies flow, Left Column = group by Year of Release (newest first), Right Column = sort by Title.

If anyone has answers, please let me know. Thanks

[jorton]

1. Fanart is all handled by Phoenix/BMT or if you want to provide you own manually with the media you can set the fanart to look for folder.jpg, poster.jpg etc from the fanart settings.

2. Not yet, Opus just added that and we replace the weather screen with out own.

3. Not that I know of, propbably a Jusjoken quesiton.

4. You can create your own VFS that sorts that way or build your own View from the Gemstone Flow UI.

From the Dual Flow,

Use the Upcoming Movies VFS.
Then go into View Options.
Set Level-1 Group by to Year
Set Level-1 Sort by to Original Air Date Descending
Set Level-2 Sort by to Title Ascending with the "The, A, An" options as you would like them.
Then you can set your filters to HD or whatever you want.

[mdnttoker]

Definitely a bit of a learning curve with Gemstone, but I've found it is well worth it!

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by jorton

1. Fanart is all handled by Phoenix/BMT or if you want to provide you own manually with the media you can set the fanart to look for folder.jpg, poster.jpg etc from the fanart settings.

Thanks. What was confusing me was that I thought that Gemstone was built on Phoenix, so I thought that implied that the fanart and metadata scraping was built-in.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by mdnttoker

Definitely a bit of a learning curve with Gemstone, but I've found it is well worth it!

Yeah, it looks pretty nice... Definately a few areas that are still a little confusing to me (I imagine they seem very obvious to those who have been using it all along).

I set-up a laptop with a spare Sage license and configured a dummy tuner so I could experiment with Gemstone. I also copied over the wiz.bin file from my production machine so that my Sage Recordings screen would be populated with stuff.

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by Tiki

• If I create a custom flow, is there a way to hide repeat airings? The Malore menus can do this (it's useful if creating a flow to show upcoming movies sorted by title and you don't want it to list the same movie 10 times in a row, for example).

In theory the answer is yes... you just need to group the top level of the view by show or title and if the same show/title is used for an item then it will display once... and can be drilled down to then next level if desired.

Really... you just need to experiment with custom groups/sort options for views like this one.

and as you dive into Gemstone... feel free to ask questions...

k

[Tiki]

Another question... Is there a way to enforce aspect ratios on fan art?

My main TV is an old CRT-Projection HDTV - it's 1080i, but it has a 4:3 aspect ratio. Sage hanldes this fine for most things (older SD content with a 4:3 aspect ratio gets scaled up to fit the screen, wide-screen content gets letterboxed, text and graphics are rendered correctly so they don't appear stretched, etc..).

But, it looks like Gemstone stretches the images to fill the screen or a specific rectangle, assuming that the screen has a 16x9 aspect ratio. You can see what I mean if you run Sage in a Window and re-size the window for a different aspect ratio. Is there any way around this?

[jusjoken]

The short answer I believe is no... but it is an interesting suggestion... we would need to think about how to force the UI to adjust for the AR for the fanart displays... likely doable, just need to figure the approach needed.

JOrton may have another suggestion or ideas on how we may accomplish this.

k

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

The short answer I believe is no... but it is an interesting suggestion... we would need to think about how to force the UI to adjust for the AR for the fanart displays... likely doable, just need to figure the approach needed.

JOrton may have another suggestion or ideas on how we may accomplish this.

k

I had done an STVi back in the Sage v6 days to make use of Phoenix Fanart. When I displayed fan art, I only specified one dimension (width or height). If you do this, Sage keeps the aspect ratio intact.

It's been awhile since I looked at the STV code, but I think I made the assumption that if the image was a "poster" it would have a portrait orientation, and if it was a "background" it would have a landscape orientation. Then I would only the dimension that was most critical to the layout. So if I was displaying a background as close to full-screen as possible, I would only specify the width. If I was displaying a poster as full screen, I would only specify the height.

This logic isn't perfect, but it works for most cases. The more correct way would be to actually determine the aspect ratios of the display and of the image and see which is larger to determine whether to set the height or the width.

Of course, there are probably people out there who don't like black bars, and would prefer the image to stretch to fill the screen - I'm just not one of them.

[Fuzzy]

You could spend less time doing an odd job or two to afford a new TV.. :-)