[Android] aMPdroid - Android MediaPortal Client (1 Viewer)

[DieBagger]

Hi guys,



as you might know there is not one, but two android projects for MediaPortal in the making. This one is called aMPdroid and makes use of the upcoming webservices for MediaPortal, Tv4Home and GMA (General Media Access). Also there will be a part to control MediaPortal clients through a plugin, but it is at this point not clear which plugin will be used / if a new one has to be written. The idea of the app is that the user can define multiple virtual clients. Each client consists of an tv api (tv4home), a media access api (gma) and a client control api (!?! tbd).



The app will use a couple of "new" android ui patterns that have been introduced on the google i/o 2010 (YouTube - Google I/O 2010 - Android UI design patterns):

Dashboard



The central entry point with links to all essential parts of the application. Currently this links to the following sections

• Remote Control
• Media Access (Videos/Series/Movies)
• Music
• TV
• Pictures
• ?!? tbd (Plugins/Settings/etc.)

This is o.c. still wip and open for discussion, also the icons aren't what I want (same goes for actionbar) but as you can see I'm not really a graphics guy. So if anyone wants to help out with gfx, it would be highly appreciated.

Actionbar

Instead of the (old) standard android title bar this new titlebar includes a home button that will bring you back to the homescreen from any screen within the app. It also has a textual description of the current screen and buttons for a) changing the client and b) accessing the application search.

Quickactions



Long-clicking on an item will open a context menu with actions related to this icon. Long-pressing on a media item for example shows a menu for downloading the file to the sd card.

Bottombar with SlidingDrawer



The bottombar has buttons to control the currently active client (play/pause/prev/next/volume/...) and a slider that can be dragged up to display information on the currently running item.


Keep in mind that project is still in a very early stage and much of the work has been made on the parts you don't see (background services, architecture, ...). The current source code and issue tracker can be found on the project page.

Promotional Videos:

• Teaser of ampdroid
• Showing the tvserver section of ampdroid

aMPdroid 0.6 released
You can find the thread for aMPdroid 0.6 in this thread.

 

[canarygsr]

Have you seen this android kit TV
Build Your Own Android-based TV Thanks to VidTonic [VIDEO] [CES 2011] | Android Phone Fans

I like the idea of just having my back end hidden away and just a couple of these TV's connecting to it with android, no frontend PC's required......

 

[DieBagger]

Hi, I've started with the implementation of the tvserver functionality (provided by tv4home) in ampdroid and it's progressing quite nicely.

What's already done:

• Manual control (Show active timeshifts, start/stop timeshifting)
• Channels: Show all groups/channels, show epg for channels, record programs from epg
• Recording: Show all recordings
• Schedules: Show all schedules, delete schedules

Still on the todo list is mainly the epg view. The goal is to implement a view like the one from kiwijunglists mockups (see https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/webservice-mobile-access-537/kiwijunglists-android-concept-90087/ ):



The only problem is that this needs a complete custom view since using standard android layouts for this is too much of a performance hog (I tried ).

And of course many small improvements for the existing screens (e.g. detail screens for programs/schedules/recordings, more actions for items, downloading of recordings to device, playback on client, ...).


Enough said, here are a few screenshots showing the current state of the implementation:

 

[Raytestrak]

Looks promising, can't wait to try it out.

 

[niblet]

Will this work on smaller resolution Android devices such as the htc Wildfire?

 

[DieBagger]

Will this work on smaller resolution Android devices such as the htc Wildfire?

For now all the layouting is done for devices with larger screen resolutions and portrait display (like my htc desire hd, samsung galaxy s, etc.).

As android offer good tools to make your app adapt to different screen resolutions it will be possible to also create layouts for smaller screen resolutions/landscape mode. Same goes for larger devices like the galaxy tab.

 

[AgeOfPanic]

Oh man, can't wait for this to work. The only reason that I have switched to XBMC right now, is the lack of a remote function in MP. Keep it up guys, the screens look really promising.

 

[DieBagger]

I have been improving the list loading (lazy loading, loading on demand, ...) the past few days, here's a small teaser of listviews in ampdroid with different views (layout is still wip ). The current views are Poster, Thumb (using fanart) and Banner, if you have ideas for additional views please feel free to share your thoughts/mockups...

 

[romuz]

Where is slobbering smiley?

 

[Raytestrak]

Bannerview looks a-ma-zing.