How to use Movie sheets

B-RAD has recently announced the availability of Movie Sheets on the custom fw, here is a short demo of how it looks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNDQxnVkFEM

Introduction

Moviesheets are fullscreen, prerendered images which are displayed as background when you select a folder or media file. There are three basic modes:

• SHEET
  In sheet mode you will see 7 thumbs or 7 list items (depending on thumb/list mode) at the bottom of the screen and the sheet displayed as background.
  
• WALL
  In wall mode you will see 4x3 thumbs or 10 list items on the left of the screen and the sheet displayed as background.
  
• STD
  In std mode you will see the normal thumb/list view if no sheet is found and a full screen sheet in foreground (overlaying the thumbs/list) if a sheet is found.

There are currently two different ways to get Moviesheets displaying on WDLXTV:

• LINKSHEETS
  This is the "old" method of displaying moviesheets. It's a shell script which searches for sheets on your drives and link them in to the OSD. If you have a lot of media files this takes quite some time and this scan is repeated on each reboot.
  Linksheets works on G2, LIVE and PLUS in any newer WDLXTV version!
  • PRO:
    • Very fast display of the sheets while browsing media files. There's almost no delay when the sheets are displayed.
  • CONTRA:
    • Sheet filenames MUST be unique!
    • Scanning on boot takes a long time (depending on how many files to scan)

• WDTVExt MovieSheet plugin
  This is a WDTVExt plugin which will search for sheet files dynamically while you are browsing your media files.
  • PRO:
    • No time consuming drive scan on boot
    • Ability to hide the movie name when a sheet is present
    • Ability to show full screen std mode sheet in wall and sheet mode
  • CONTRA:
    • Sheets are displayed slower. The delay before they show up depends on the location (network/usb) and the sheet's filename.

You must also understand that there are two different types of sheet files:

• file sheets
  These are sheets for media files.
• folder Sheets
  These arwe sheets for folder (or directories).

There is a thread on the forum explaining the search algorithm used to search for sheets.
You should really read and understand it! WDLXTV-G2/Live/Plus-0.4.2.1+ MovieSheets Naming conventions 'These file naming conventions are valid for both versions!

Setting it up

To set it up you must telnet to the device and enter these commands:

config_tool -c MSHEETMODE=sheet
config_tool -c VIDMSHEET=ON
config_tool -c GENMSHEET=ON
config_tool -c LISTMSHEET=ON

MSHEETMODE

MSHEETMODE is the global moviesheet mode setting. Values can be "sheet" (Folder icons on the bottom), "wall" (icons on the left of screen) or std (Standard mode ?).

FOR THOSE WHO THIS ‘ISN'T WORKING’ FOR:

You *MUST* have the ‘show filesize setting in options OFF’ in order to see sheets for individual movies. It also works better of connected USB drives than from network shares.

Remember you can always call these commands automatically via the S00custom-options

Updating movie information

Now you need to generate the actual data for your movie collection. The easiest available way to do this is via the "ThumbGen" utility (you can get it here).

To use ThumbGen for movie sheets (and not just thumbnails) you must have some kind of template, and you can find some of these on the wdtvforums here (thanks to QuickSurfer for the great post).

How to setup the movie file, subtitle file and jpg files

I use sheets and create them with Thumbgenerator. This is how I have named and placed the files:

Movie (folder) Action (folder) 300 (folder) 300.mkv (movie file) 300.mkv_sheet.jpg (sheet file) 300.jpg (thumb for the movie) folder.jpg (thumb for the folder) 300.srt (subtitle)

(still missing step by step instructions on updating moviesheets... )