Using MP on an Ultra Mobile PC

[davidmaiden]

Hi, guys. Before I go ahead I must say that from only a few hours with Media Portal I can say it really is an excellent piece of work.

I stumbled upon Media Portal when I was looking for a touch screen media playing solution for my new UMPC (For anyone who doesn’t know what a UMPC is, it is an UltraMobile PC, bigger than a PDA, but smaller than a laptop) See picture.



I plan on mounting this in my car and using media portal to control and play my music and video's etc on the move. Media Portal works well with the touch screen interface of the UMPC. The fact that the icon sizes of files/thumbnails can be changed in setting is an excellent edition of windows media center for example.

However from my experience there are two functions which are lacking which mean that MP is not idea for a UMPC user. I would appreciate any support on if these things can be done, and how I should do it (I've not yet found ways)

1. The playback controls, play, fast forward, pause etc are set to auto hide, how can I make it so this is always on display (with a touchscreen you don’t want to have to tap the screen to bring it up before you can use these controls)

2. A UMPC fitted to a car will not have a keyboard attached, there are some controls i.e. page up and page down buttons on the unit itself. The lack of a keyboard means there are no methods to change the volume! This is an important feature. How would I, and is it possible for me to modify the keyboard mapping so that 'Page Up' and 'Page down' would raise or lower volume levels.

Looking forward to anyone’s reply, and I’m happy to offer further discussion on running MP on a UMPC

[funkstar]

that is much nicer than the Samsung one i've seen.

I guess it would be possible to customise a skin to have all the controls you need on screen at the same time. I've never looked at the skins, so i don't know how complex or otherwise that would be.

[davidmaiden]

ive tried different skins and some are more suitable than others. the main issue is with if it is possible to remap the keyboard so that the page up/page down buttons on the unit can control volume. I dont know if this is possible at present or if there is a way I can do this

[rtv]

For that reason I'm using a powermate to control the volume of my carputer

[Bram]

Cool thing, but it isn't cheap....at all....for one knob.