iTunes and iPhoto integration plugin in XBMC for Mac

[d4rk]

Some of you might be interested in knowing that XBMC (as of Beta 1) now has basic support for accessing your iTunes and iPhoto libraries from inside XBMC. The integration is implemented as experimental plugins so everything might not work as expected, or at all, but you are welcome to give it a shot and provide feedback in this thread. DRM content is not supported in iTunes.

More details about it can be found here.

[adam h]

I've done a little fiddling and so far I've got the following questions / issues:

Photos:
I can't figure out how to get thumbnails to appear for any iphoto albums; when I select "Regenerate Thumbnails" from the list, nothing happens.

When I select "Recursive Slideshow" on an iPhoto album, it crashes xbmc.

iTunes:
when I go into Playlists, the playlists all say they have 15 tracks, and they all have blank names.

is there any way to do CDDB scraping for the itunes info?

It's Awesome!!!

thanks

[d4rk]

Greetings

Originally Posted by adam h

I can't figure out how to get thumbnails to appear for any iphoto albums; when I select "Regenerate Thumbnails" from the list, nothing happens.

Yup, Albums currently don't have a thumbnail, as of now only Event thumbs are respected from iPhoto. Albums actually don't specify a thumb in iPhoto, so like you said, adding functionality to specify a thumb or selecting one randomly from the Album would be useful.

When I select "Recursive Slideshow" on an iPhoto album, it crashes xbmc.

Does navigating into an album and then selecting 'SlideShow' on the left work (left if you're using PM3, right under MediaStream)?

iTunes:
when I go into Playlists, the playlists all say they have 15 tracks, and they all have blank names.

Is this with iTunes 8 or 7?

is there any way to do CDDB scraping for the itunes info?

Not sure I follow, CDDB is usually specific to audio CDs?

[adam h]

Originally Posted by d4rk

Does navigating into an album and then selecting 'SlideShow' on the left work (left if you're using PM3, right under MediaStream)?

I was using MediaStream; which sadly lacks that option ( as far as I can tell! ) -- but when I switched to PM3, the slideshow within each individual album worked perfectly. NICE!

Originally Posted by d4rk

Is this with iTunes 8 or 7?

iTunes 8.

Originally Posted by d4rk

Not sure I follow, CDDB is usually specific to audio CDs?

Yeah, I'm being a little ... ridiculous. I guess once you've ripped MP3s it's actually already grabbed data from CDDB and populated itself. I guess I was just thinking of album art which is already on the list so ignore this last part!

Thanks again for such a kickass product.

[d4rk]

iTunes 8.

Interesting. Are you seeing the same behavior with the PM3 skin? It's possible that the default view that gets chosen makes reading the list hard.

If possible, could you post a screenshot of what it looks like.

Thanks.

[adam h]

Oh, you're totally right -- it's a skin issue. Switching to Aeon or PM3 the playlist names are readable.

I'm sorry, I'll be more thorough with my exploration before I post bugs! I'm new to this software and wasn't aware of all the angles.

[NoPantsJim]

Question, does playing a track through XBMC affect that track's "last played" and "play count" information in iTunes? I can't tell from reading the details, and I haven't yet purchased a Mac mini to run XBMC on.

The reason I ask is I am a total smart playlist junkie, especially now that I've got my iPhone that is only 8gigs . It'd be awesome if playing tracks on XBMC affected the "last played" and "play count" as nearly all of my smart playlists are based on these fields.

[d4rk]

Originally Posted by adam h

I'm sorry, I'll be more thorough with my exploration before I post bugs! I'm new to this software and wasn't aware of all the angles.

No worries, your report was useful, it still is a bug since it should be visible clearly in all skins in the default view. I'll test it further to see how it can be rectified.

Originally Posted by NoPantsJim

Question, does playing a track through XBMC affect that track's "last played" and "play count" information in iTunes? I can't tell from reading the details, and I haven't yet purchased a Mac mini to run XBMC on.

No, it doesn't alter the iTunes library in any way. It provides a read-only interface to iTunes. Technically, it might be possible to effect that change using some clever Applescript.

[NoPantsJim]

Unfortunately I don't know Applescript, and I am not clever

[Neph]

Hello

Been two years since my last visit, how things have changed for XBMC. Now if I could get my xbox to stop random reboots, but that's another thread. Now on to XBMC for MAC.

Where do we find the itunes/iphoto plugins? they're not in the directory structure of xbmc (plugins/music). Are they downloadable somewhere? if so, where?

Thanks