What skin resolution?

[eLow]

Hi all,

What resolution should a skin design be? The default skins are 720x576. But I know there are also higher resolution screens out there (with other aspect ratios). I read some posts on high resolution skins and wide screen skins but haven't seen any examples yet.

[FlipGer]

Hi,

a skin should use resolutions of the "normal" output. Since MP is designed to be used on a TV the most common resolution is PAL (720x576). Since HDTV is comming it also would be nice to have skins in those resolutions, like 720p (1280x720) or 1080p (1920x1080).

Flip.

[Maschine]

Originally Posted by FlipGer

Since HDTV is comming it also would be nice to have skins in those resolutions, like 720p (1280x720) or 1080p (1920x1080).

Hi,

I second this. As MP already has 3 nice 4:3 PAL skins, a widescreen "HDTV ready" skin would be something new and very useful for users with widescreen TVs. As the number of these users will grow more and more in the near future we should think about this...

Maschine

[eLow]

It wouldn't be too much trouble to make two versions of the skin I guess if the resolution of the images stays the same. For instance, a 720x576 and a 1024x576 version. Or a 1280x1024 and a 1280x720 version.

Are there any examples of high resolution skins out there? Does MP scale down the graphics nicely? A small down side of higher res would be file size.

BTW, 720x576 has a ratio of 5:4. Does that mean my TV has rectangular pixels?

Is it as simple as resizing all the images - say with IrfanView's batch function, so that the images are displayed correctly when scaled to your display resolution? Since 16:9 is 4/3 as wide as 4:3 I would do the reverse and make the horizontal res of the images 3/4 of the original. Does that make sense?

Hmm, not pretty. I smell a n00b. Oh, it's me! Sorry... :lol:

[Boilermaker]

Is it as simple as resizing all the images

from my experience not really, but maybe i took the long way around. when i first started to reskin mce to look better on my tv (1280x720), i started by resizing all the images by the same amount, and it didnt look very good. i ended up just sort of tinkering with each image to find how things fit together nicely. for example, i think the origianal mce buttons on the left hand side are 190x32, i made them 300x34, but i did do a batch resize of the hover images on the home page, making each 1.5 times their original size.

and after you have done the images, you then need to go thru all the xml files and set all the locations of each button, textlable, etc. it would be a lot to demand of a skin creator, but three versions of a skin would be nice: a 720x576 skin, a skin at 4x3 (640x480?) and another skin at 16x9 (960x540?).

[eLow]

Hmmz, what's the output resolution to your tv? I thought making a widescreen skin was just a questiion of repositioning the objects on a wider surface, leaving the aspect ratio of the images themselves the same. Then, I'd only have to make one set of high resolution graphics and two backgrounds.

Could you make your skin available to see how it works out?

[deecue]

BTW, 720x576 has a ratio of 5:4. Does that mean my TV has rectangular pixels?

No, all tvs have square pixels.. all computer monitor's have square pixels. all video files/bitmap images have "square" pixels. pixels are pixels. one unit high, one unit wide.

when the dv interface came about, this all became hell with the idea of non-square pixels (.9 for NTSC, 1.07 for PAL). 720x480 for NTSC and 720x576 for PAL. but video files in those resolutions with "non-square" pixels, still have same old pixels just like anything else, there is just a flag set at the begining of the encoding to tell whatever device/software to stretch\squish it a certain way during play back so that it is displayed properly when viewing it. luckily, HD has gotten rid of all this nonsense and is fully square pixels. My hope is in a decade or so, the whole non-square thing is finally gone and out of everyone's system.

But as far as your PAL resolution of 720x576 having a 5:4 ratio, it does not actually mean that. it means that it has a 5:4 pixel ratio with a 1.07 non-square pixel flag set to stretch it when played back. The 4:3 square pixel equivalant of PAL DV is 768x576. And 768 divided by 720 is 1.0666667 or more reasonably, 1.07. So in essence, your 5:4 pixel ratio video file/stream is being played back at a 4x3 ratio once the non-square pixel flag is taken in to account..

Does that clear it up a little bit? Or did I just make more of a mess of things.. :wink:

HTH,
dave

[eLow]

Not sure :-) How does this work for computer images displayed on that screen? Is it stretched? Cropped? Right now I output it to my tv where it displays a 1024x768 desktop.