What about Skin on 16/9 resolutions ?

Hello,

I'm using a 16/9 projector, so my screen resolution is set to 1280x720, i'm using the MCE standard skin wich is the most visually neutral, but skin buttons and images are stretched (like shut-off, background images, various icons, etc)

Some part are well stretched, but others are not.

Is there any plan to make either a 'special' 16/9 skin or will mediaportal support special 16/9 resolutions ?

If not, could i get mce skin and manually strech images and create a new 16/9 mce skin ?

Let me know

Pascal

[dman_lfc]

Have you tried pixel ratio correction in Settings from within MP?
If not set the square as accurately as you can get it (Should be easy when projecting - avoiding you're own shadow of course)

Otherwise no there is no 16:9 skin.
I was going to look into it a while back and take MCE to do it but you have to dedicate alot of time which I dont have - and well it's probably a patience thing also. :roll:

DMAN

Hello,

there is not a problem to do it, in fact i already do a minimal 16/9 mce skin for my personal use.

What i changed for now is just 2 changes in home.xml and topbarhome.xml to add extra 33% in height in some button and 'start' text, plus resized all 'hover_*.png' images 133% plus some very visible images like cd logo that lost it's 'round' and looks like an egg

In fact i think it's possible to auto-generate 16/9 skin from 4/3 skin by simply batch resize a subset of images and automatically adding an extra 33% in some xml 'height' tags when the image size is hard coded in xml.

May be writing an auto generating 16/9 skin could be an idea. (when i say that, i mean i can write the tool, i'm not asking anyone to do it of course)

This approach permits to maintain only one skin, no need to update also the 16/9 one is it may be auto generated as 4/3 skin changes.

Pascal

[dman_lfc]

Pascal,

I'm sure this type of tool would be very welcome.
Please look into it as many users have HDTV, Plasma & Projectors etc which would benefit.

DMAN.

For people who want to test my skin, you may download it there:

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/freqresplot/mediaportal

It's a very limited package just home and some images, but i'll enhance it as i discover visual stretched images.

Pascal

Yep those pictures look correct now!
Thanks!

Now to make it use more of the screen and without the overscan TV has for us Projector/Plasma guys/girls.

File Updated on the site: i changed radio buttons and < > ^ v icons to correct their aspect ratio

Pascal

[Mr.Mitchell]

Another apprach to this could be to actually change the aspect ratio of the skin to 16:9. See references.xml at the top of the file. I think that if you increase the width 1024 you have the correct aspect ratio.

Reason to change the aspect ratio is that you don't have to change images and that you get more space that can be used to make for example the Thumb panels wider to show more colums. This can also be setup in references.xml. Now there are probably only a bunch of text labels that are too far to the left . Since these are aligned to the right it should be possible to make a script that would move them to the right. Somthing like:

Foreach xml file in the skin
look for labels that are located at the right side of the screen
lets say they should be within 60 pixels of the right border
(maybe check for right alignment?)
change the Posx so the control moves to the right

Maybe this could even be done for all controls.
I don't know if this really works, but it might be worth a try (I don't have a widescreen so I can't test myself)

Hello,

Changing skin width simply changes nothing... all buttons remains stretched because they are images for radio buttons and whatever you put in resolution everything is streched to fill the screen in fullscreenmode.

For example radio buttons of green and blue background text, the image has not been resized because for the text the aspect ratio is kept, i just resized the bullet into the image.

For the 2nd point you're right, i'm going to change thumbnail panel to add extra width, and show more images on my 1280x720 screen.

It's not finished, for instance i just begun with radio/check boxes/arrows.

I also expanded the MessageBox, instead of correcting its aspect ratio, i made it wider for a better look.

But... you pointed a problem that i did'nt think is that writing a 16/9 skin designed for a 1280x720 screen may look tiny on a 848x480 16/9 projector.

As far as i know there are:

720x576 screens in 16/9 anamorphic (tv pal in 16/9 mode)
1024x1024 screens in 16/9 anamorphic non squae pixels (plasma)
848x480 (projector)
960x540 (projector)
1024x576 (projector)
1280x720 (projector / plasma)
1920x1080 (projector / plasma)

I'll make some test to show what happend in these cases. May be desinging the skin for a 1024x576 display is a win-win situation, it's in the middle, not too small for 848x480 and not too large for a 1280x720.

keeping the skin 576 pixels high (and not 720) is a good idea to avoid 1080 interlaced displays to flicker too much.

Finally i think making a tool to automatically strech the skin given the resolution will be the best but it don't have time now

Pascal

[MrMario64]

thats the reason why we make a skin for the lowest resolution to.
Making a skin for 1024x768 will make stuff look awefully small on a TV.

W could do auto widescreen compensation btw.
xbmp had this.

The disadvantage was that the texts were also re-scaled.
This made it look all very jagged and ugly (the fonts)

Maybe dx9 is better @ this as xbox was.
Dunno..