The improvised solution to this is to:
- Enter a folder which contains a folder that contains an image
- Select the folder's image to be the folder's icon
- Disable preview in the upper left
- Select the icons view mode in the upper left
- Zoom in to the maximum by ctrl+mousewheel
- Change the font size for the icons view mode under Control->Configure Dolphin...->View Modes->Icons->Label font->Custom->Size
The maximum zoom-level might be a bit too small. I created an issue on this here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420657#c0
- To increase the zoom level (the size of the icons) and to make the media-center more conveniently / quickly accessible:
right click on KDE icon in bottom left->Edit applications...->click on Multimedia->click on New Item...->give it a name like Moviecenter, set the icon on the right, set the Command to:
QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 dolphin ~/Movies (if your movies folder is located at ~/Movies)->click on save->type Moviecenter/the name into the search->right click it->click on Add to Panel (Widget) so that it always shows in the bottom left panel
I asked about starting dolphin in fullscreen mode from the command line here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420851 and eventually came up with this command:
QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 dolphin ~/Movies & sleep 0.8 && wmctrl -r "Movies — Dolphin" -b add,fullscreen paste this into the Command field of the new shortcut to start the window in fullscreen mode. If you want to start it only maximized just replace "fullscreen" with "maximized_horz,maximized_vert". To make the fullscreen work make sure you have wmctrl installed with sudo apt-get install wmctrl.
You can also toggle (hide) the panel on the right for more screen space: in Dolphin simply uncheck Control->Panels->Information.
Possible media center features
Furthermore it would be useful to have movie-related tags like "Genres" and "Imdb rating" on all folders within the movies folder. However I couldn't find a way to add these tags which is why I asked about it here:
How to add custom tags (metadata) to all folders within a folder?
Export of Media Center
If you want to export (copy) your Media Center (to another computer) you need to change the folder-icon filepaths in all (hidden) .directory files. You can do this like so (thanks to the answerers of /q/598768/233262):
IFS='
'
set -o noglob
for file in $(grep -rl --include='*.directory' "/file/path/to/replace" ~/MediaCenterFolder); do
printf '%s\n' "$file"
sed -i 's/\/file\/path\/to\/replace\/\/new\/path/g' $file
done
You need to replace the 3 directory paths in the code above and copy this into exportMediaCenter.sh then run chmod +x ./exportMediaCenter.sh and exportMediaCenter.sh after you have cded into the directory the .sh file is located in. If you only need to replace a word without needing to escape / it would be: sed -i 's/texttoreplace/newtext/g' $file
Better solution
The best way for this would be to have directory-specific view settings and have a preconfigured folder view settings profile called "Movies" which automatically configures all those things dependent on some user variables such as display size. But it's currently not possible to do this with dolphin. I might create two issues for this and link them here if and once the issue linked above has been implemented.
Two alternative better solutions would be using Kodi or online streaming services. The latter has some disadvantages to the approach above and doesn't work for me with my technical setup and there were some issues with the former that needed to be solved first.
