Animating home page with gifs or video? (1 Viewer)

[nhoffman82]

Hello all, I'm trying to develop my own skin and want to bring some animation to the home page. I could use animated gifs, but those kind of look choppy and are a pain to make ... I was wondering if it's possible to call up a video file from myhome.xml and have it loop as an animation (I want to have a TV image with animations of music, weather, etc. shown inside it when selected). Is this possible at all, or should I just start making gifs? Also is there any way to use animated gifs for the weather icons?

Thanks,
Nick

 

[joz]

I do not think there will be anyway to achieve this through video but I can suggest something else to consider;

Ever saw the loading circle or animation within MP? This is not a animated gif! It's a sequence of (png) images.
I never really created a animated gif myself (did some but with really fully automated tools) so do not know if this will save you some work.

The plus side of this approach is that you can make it as stutter free as you like. Might take a lot of images though.

 

[sa_ddam213]

I found the easy way is to use multiple .png images then write an .xml to replace the image in the skin folder
eg. Hover_my video.png to Hover_my video.xml

not sure if this works with all images in all skins but works fine for me on hovers and logos
have a look at my first have finished skin Animated Mepo 0.0.0.1

Here an example of one for video button

 

[Bleazle]

I've been wanting to add some animation to my hover images for ages - this is great! Thanks for the tip

Bleazle

 

[sa_ddam213]

You are defiantly better at skinning than me (as i used beazle wide) so you may find this useful .it makes the glass behind the home buttons animated (bit like smoke) . found while mucking around with old old mediaportal skins(simplify 0.2.1) . Keep up the good work. I love animating things just for the hell of it ,lol

sa_ddam213 (kiwi to but stuck in aussie)

 

[Bleazle]

Thanks for that, I'll have a look tonight.

One problem I've run into though is that (on my system at least) this is a real RAM killer I've animated 5 of the buttons on my Home screen (nothing fancy, just a simple fade in effect, but each one uses 24 PNG images) and that's maxed out my RAM and really slowed things down - for example when I go back to the Home screen from any other screen it takes around 20 seconds to load - bummer! (System: 1gb DDR RAM, P4 3Ghz CPU) So unfortunately that's the deal breaker for me.

With regard to your comment above "not sure if this works with all images" - you might already know this but just in case anyone else wants to know; To animate any image just use this code where you want the animation to appear (this is how the "loading" image in MP works too):


<control>
<type>animation</type>
<id>7600</id>
<posX>320</posX>
<posY>340</posY>
<width>250</width>
<height>200</height>
<textures>animations\folder name\****.png;animations\folder name\****.png;..... animations\folder name\****.png</textures>
<Duration>0:0:01.5</Duration>
<keepaspectratio>yes</keepaspectratio>
</control>

I made up an equaliser animation yesterday (what a mission! 38 images; trying to remember which bars should be heading up or down in each layer (in Photoshop) - I'm in no hurry to become a graphic artist that's for sure!!) which I added to the MusicNowPlaying screen. I haven't checked yet but I'd assume that it will have the same RAM usage issues as above though.

Let us know if you work out a way to animate images without the RAM being crunched - it would be great if MP supported Animated PNG files - it would open up all sorts of possibilities - at the moment I think only Firefox does? Maybe someone should look into it...

(kiwi to but stuck in aussie)

You should add that to your signature

Dave

 

[sa_ddam213]

I never noticed the lag in GUI but i have 4g of ram. if i can find a way for mediaportal to cache the images it may run faster. But easy solution is more ram ,lol

Will have a look tonight . Chur

 

[Bleazle]

... Chur

Any non-Kiwis will be wondering what you meant to type

Yeah caching is definitely the solution - I've just checked the image cache files and none of these animated files are there - The "common waiting" file is cached though so why does that get cached and not the equaliser images I call in the same way?

With regard to RAM - Yeah I'm going to up that to 4GB soon - probably this week, but even though I've made the BeazleWide skin for me (I only uploaded it originally because I thought someone else might want the same sort of look) over 9,000 downloads to date would suggest that "one or two" other people are using it so I don't really want to make it unusable for anyone with low RAM.

I don't know anything about this sort of stuff so if you can come up with something that would be great!

Cheers

Dave

 

[p13man]

Do you guys know the meaning of the three values (shown here as 1:2:3) in the <Duration>1:2:3</Duration> element?
I know the last one is the frame rate and the higher the value the faster the animation - but don't know the range or what the other two do. I've tried a couple of random values but the animation either doesn't show or shows only the first frame. Any help?

 

[Bleazle]

Do you guys know the meaning of the three values (shown here as 1:2:3) in the <Duration>1:2:3</Duration> element?
I know the last one is the frame rate and the higher the value the faster the animation...

Are you sure? I thought the last one (i.e. "3")was how many seconds it takes for the animation to run. When I had it set to 0.5 the animation finished too quick so I changed it to 1.5 and it took a bit longer - that's all I did as far as playing around with the settings is concerned so I'm happy to be proven wrong here!

Hopefully sa_ddam213 will be able to sort out the cache thing (no pressure man!) and I'll be able to use this effect...