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A Clone

OK, Wow. I'm pretty blown away by this, aphanson17! It's astoundingly close to the real thing, so much so that it's truly hard to tell the difference without looking very very closely. You've done an amazing job and clearly are talented.

Setting aside the copyright issues that would plague this ever becoming anything more than a fun little personal project, it would now be fun to see you begin to try some things that IMPROVE on the K interface, just as ideas or concepts on where things could go. (you can all guess which one I'd love to see). :)

Anyway, this is mighty impressive.

--josh

p.s. I hope you don't mind, I edited your link above into the format that lets the video play inline here on the forum. It's a youtube "embed" so your play count on youtube will still reflect any plays that happen here inline.

Thanks for the compliment Josh.

And I have thought about improving upon the UI for TV Shows as I don't like the fact that every season has it's own cover. It seems dumb to me from a UI perspective. If I'm looking for a specific episode I don't want to keep going back and finding more season and searching through there. It's a lot more clicks. I have thought about doing a double slide out. Instead of just the slide out for the episodes, I was thinking of doing a slide out of Seasons, followed by a slideout of episodes for that season. Or even just having one long list with all the episodes seems like a UI I would prefer over the kscape implementation. That being said, I like the former and think I will take that approach for TV shows. Thanks for you thoughts.

-Andrew
 
New Update

I will be posting a new video soon with progress. Included in this update are:

- Multiple IR remotes. I have 2 IR remotes, one for main control and a child remote that when you push any button switches to covers view with only child appropriate movies.
- New TV show view. There is now one movie cover per Series. When you click on a movie you scroll down to select season, you then scroll through and select which season you want and then select which episode from that season. Play all will play all in the entire series now.
- Added a few more UI improvements

Coming soon:

- Collections view. Being able to add anything you want to a collection, including individual episodes (Not sure if this can currently be done in Kaleidescape but I think it's important to have). I want to be able to add a collection of my favorite episodes from a TV series. Or favorite episodes from multiple TV Series (Ex: favorite comedy episodes from all my TV Series).
- Shuffle titles. With my new animations library that I coded from scratch, I will have to write a lot of code to handle the shuffling of the movies. I'm dreading the amount of work for this one which is why it's not done yet :). I have started working on a new algorithm for it and once I finalize it I can go ahead and start coding it.


Things I think that would make this cooler:

- Netflix implementation. I am imagining clicking Netflix mode and having all the Kaleidescape blue turn to red and showing Netflix movies. Either ones you've added to your list or perhaps all. Not sure how the algorithm will work yet. Could possibly do amazon prime as well. Another thing I thought would be to find a movie you like in your collection and hit a button to get similar movies from Netflix or Amazon Prime. Then you wouldn't have an overwhelming amount of Netflix movies to scroll through but could find similar movies that you have access to.

- Music. Just like movies, I love music too. Since I know longer buy CD's and just use Spotify, I thought it would be pretty cool to just load Spotify in a Kaleidescape UI. This shouldn't be too hard since spotify has an open API with metadata and everything.

If there are any other requests you guys would like to see, please let me know. Thanks Josh for the idea about the TV shows.

-Andrew
 
- New TV show view. There is now one movie cover per Series. When you click on a movie you scroll down to select season, you then scroll through and select which season you want and then select which episode from that season. Play all will play all in the entire series now.
That's fantastic... now we're seeing a "clone" that is pushing forward on things Kaleidescape should do, but doesn't seem to want to do. Awesome... so eager to see your implementation of this aphanson!
 
- Collections view. Being able to add anything you want to a collection, including individual episodes (Not sure if this can currently be done in Kaleidescape but I think it's important to have). I want to be able to add a collection of my favorite episodes from a TV series. Or favorite episodes from multiple TV Series (Ex: favorite comedy episodes from all my TV Series).

Not in collections themselves, but we could put them together in a script. Don't recall if that gives us the playlist we can navigate around.
 
Does anyone happen to know what font Kaleidescape uses? I figure I will ask before I just blindly start trying to match it.

Thanks,
Andrew
 
Hey Everyone,

I have a few things done and updated a new video for my clone. Currently working on a very lightweight embedded OS to run the application and that's consuming the most of my time. Still working on TV show integration. That's my next goal to get done.

Since last time:
*Better animations (mainly when playing and closing movies)
*Remote control support (It doesn't show it on the video but it's being controlled by two remotes, Children and Regular)
*Child view. When any button is pushed on children remote it switches to child view. Currently I just chose a bunch of G and PG movies.






Let me know what you guys think.

-Andrew
 
Update

It's been a while since I posted. I got busy during the summer with projects around the house, smart blinds, a BBQ temp controller and currently a "Season pass" application for the MediaMall Playlater software.

The kaleidescape project is not dead, however it has changed a bit. Instead of taking on the massive back-end development work it takes to run your own Kaleidescape clone, I've decided to work strictly on the front-end, using Plex as the back-end.

This makes the system a lot easier because I can now have my kaleidescape front-end in my theater and the other devices around the house using alternative Plex clients. I was not finding enough free time to really sit down and develop the massive back-end plus I have a wife and full time job that take up time as well.

I'm excited for the new direction with the Plex back-end as the team over at Plex has really done a great job! Look for a video update in the near future.

-Andrew
 
I think that's very smart. no need to reinvent playback, metadata, file storage, etc. apply your resources to front-end stuff. Eager to see the next iteration.
 
Hi there.

It's been a while ;) I know we're all busy with family life, etc!

I wondered if there had been any progress to speak of? I'll drop you a PM too incase you don't see forum notification. Cheers

JT
 
You know what would be cool? Have this available as an app from the Google Play store, or even get it in as a Roku channel.
 
Maybe there is a way to implement the interface to Kodi or other DIY machine for the enthusiasts.
Here is an existing solution for Kodi
 
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