PlexToZidoo : An external player for plex using native Zidoo player

Can you try the default skin and see if that changes anything.

 

I just activated the default Kodi skin and you're right, it's the skin that affects the text scaling. The text is much smaller now. I would not have expected that to be the case. I would like to be able to use my preferred skin, but I'm not sure if there is anywhere to modify the text size behavior.

 

You can change the font if you go to Settings->Interface->Skin->Fonts ... looks like "Default" will make things a little bit smaller. But don't be surprised if other issues occur because you're not using the default Kodi skin. I see in the Plex forum where the upstream PM4K thread is, that the developer specifically says he will only support the default skin.

 

Many thanks @bowlingbeeg for your help.

Out of curiosity, how long does it usually take? Is it a matter of day or two - or more?

 

That may be a silly question but how do you enable ratings to be visible on that screen on the right?

 

It's sporadic ... sometimes it's quick and other times it takes longer. The developer said he's been sick so hasn't been working on it much. If it gets to be too long I can try and reverse engineer his fix and put out a new version of ZidooPlexMod with the changes.

 

Are you talking about the Rotten Tomatoes ratings? Those are there by default. Unless you've somehow managed to disable them on the Plex server side.

 

Thanks for the info. I probably would never have realized the Kodi skin was causing appearance issues in ZidooPlexMod if you hadn't mentioned it. I've run across some threads online over time where it seems like the creator of the Arctic Zephyr skin may be stubborn about not including a font size setting inside the skin even though it's possible to select which font to use (https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=337862&pid=3145178#pid3145178). Every discussion ends with people having to edit the hidden XML file with all of the defined fonts in it, but it becomes difficult to keep track of manually edited text configs across a lot of apps/services.

Is there a reason why the PM4K add-on doesn't assign its own font/scaling? I don't know what the underlying structure is of the add-on, but it would presumably make more sense for it to control its own display of text (or maybe include a menu setting to toggle between the text style inherited from the skin or an override to a defined text style within PM4K, or your own added override setting in ZidooPlexMod).

 

I don't believe addons have support for their own custom fonts and they have to rely on the active skin's fonts.

Can I ask what the use case is for not using the default skin in ZDMC? Do you actually have media outside of Plex that you want to view with the Zidoo player? If not then just set the ZidooPlexMod to automatically boot when starting ZDMC and you won't have to interact with the ZDMC much at all.

 

You're right that I don't need to spend a lot of time in the Kodi interface because I only use it for Plex, but even with a limited time in Kodi for updates/settings/etc. I really dislike the general arrangement of the onscreen elements with the default skin. And it doesn't seem to have the same level of ability to customize the contents of the main bar. I have a very minimal/clean layout with exactly what I want in the Arctic Zephyr Reloaded skin by comparison.

I'm going to try selecting between the available base fonts in my preferred skin to see if any of them have both good scaling and appearance, in which case it will end up being a simple solution without editing the XML file.

 

bowlingbeeg, I tried with the default font and it does mostly resolve the issue but still has cases where the overall length of the text on that line can begin to overlap with the ratings. It appears to become an issue when the metadata for a movie has multiple genres listed that are sufficiently long (in particular when a movie lists three genres including 'science fiction' due to the total number of characters that can result). It would probably still be most appropriate to push the video/codec text to a second line (right above the audio/subtitles line seems ideal) so that the issue would essentially never occur even if different skins/fonts are being used.

Here are some examples where the issue occurs with the default font:

 

I would open an issue on the PM4K github repo(https://github.com/pannal/plex-for-kodi/issues). That way the upstream developer can decide to fix it. If he decides not to then maybe I'll do a ZidooPlexMod only change that tries to solve it. I don't really like having that kind of difference between the two versions so I'm hoping it just gets fixed upstream. I'm trying to keep the ZidooPlexMod changes to a minimum and only for things related to Zidoo devices.

 

I did some investigating first to get an understanding of how the layout is assembled, and eventually found that a change to one character in the XML layout could provide a very solid resolution. The line number is different in the ZidooPlexMod fork, but the fix would be the same.

I submitted an issue as you requested: https://github.com/pannal/plex-for-kodi/issues/69

 

I pushed out a new release of ZidooPlexMod, version 0.2.7, to the bowlingbeeg.kodi repo. It contains the upstream fixes for the urllib3 errors.

For those still manually installing you can find the zip here:
https://github.com/bowlingbeeg/plex-for-kodi/releases/tag/ZidooPlexMod_v0.2.7

 

Hello since yesterday night i have a log error in Kodi on ZidooPlexMod

do you guys know how to fix it?

 

What does the error say exactly? Is there anything in the kodi.log file?

 

I did install the script and with no autoupdate it work thx sorry i didn't read days before

 

Hello

It is working well , i can go and wiatch video files but when i end or i go out the video it says "Failed start Zidoo player" do you guys knows why?

best regards

 

Does the "failed to start screen" go away on its own or do you have to dismiss it manually? If it automatically goes away then it's working as designed. Unfortunately the way the GUI works in Kodi I can't clear that message until after it's been shown.

 

I pushed version 0.3.0 of ZidooPlexMod to the bowlingbeeg.kodi repo. This incorporates the latest 0.7.0 version of PM4K(the upstream repo). There were a number of underlying changes to the upstream code so don't be surprised if you see some bugs. I've run it on my system for a little while during my testing and didn't see anything obviously wrong.

NOTE: In the future I won't be publishing the zip files to the release page in the github repo. You'll need to install the the bowlingbeeg.kodi(https://bowlingbeeg.github.io/bowlingbeeg.kodi/) repo where the releases will be published.

For those that are still installing manually the new release is here:
https://github.com/bowlingbeeg/plex-for-kodi/releases/tag/ZidooPlexMod_v0.3.0