Apollo One (5 Viewers)

[wizard123]

No problem, so to bring me up to speed the two player items at the top do they both display video or is one video and the other info about the video/music that is playing ?.

 

[MJGraf]

Hi wizard123!
First of all thank's a lot for doing this great work - and then immediately to your question:
MP2 supports (at least) two idependant players at the same time. Each player can play music, video or a picture slideshow completely independent from the other. Only restriction is: you can only hear the sound of one player. So these two boxes represent the two players. What you have in those boxes usually is info on what i played by the player (e.g. for music: album cover, album name, artist name, playtime in total, playtime elapsed, etc.) as well as some basic buttons for stopping the player, forward, backward, etc.
What is usually not within these two boxes are the actual videos which are played. Therefore we would probably need two separate places to show what's played in mini format.
Hope that explains it a bit...
Michael

 

[morpheus_xx]

See "Titanium" thread for example:

Two active PlayerControls, Video 1 in background, Video 2 in PiP window

 

[wizard123]

Thanks @MJGraf @morpheus_xx

I understand now, my other half would get lost instantly with that feature lol.
I will put something together later on and see what i come up with, are there any limits on where the players can be visible or anything like that ?

​

MJGraf​

 

[morpheus_xx]

There are no limits for player control visibility. In fact they appear on every screen (except fullscreens), so the overall layout should consider this.

 

[wizard123]

What about something along these lines ?

 

[morpheus_xx]

Great! I really like it

Can you make some versions for the player controls, as they are used for Image, Audio, Video (generic), Movies, Series. I mean not every source will have fanart, but maybe playback duration/current position.

Audio could have cover instead of poster etc. It means the PlayerControl style should be so generic that it can fit for all scenarios. Not all of them need to show cover etc, you know.

The next 2 big steps would be:

• create one generic button style (we only have very few generic styles, as it's not needed to create an image for each button size, vectors scale just fine )
• create an OSD template, it will be used for all fullscreen types. here is also generic approach required, OSD could scale to any size, depending on content.

I.e. for buttons you can let your creativeness out: i.e. you can define a GradientBrush as background and animating the colors when hovering the button. Or generally starting any animation on hover, i.e. to "wobble" buttons by increasing/shrinking them. Just to give you some ideas what is possible. The base technology are StoryBoards (see WPF).

 

[wizard123]

Well the idea was that the image above the controls is the video area and the coverarts at the side just slide out if they are available, is that possible ?

 

[morpheus_xx]

Yes, it's possible. We can display/hide/animate controls depending on availability of covers etc.

 

[wizard123]

How about this then, more generic can use this design for any media at all and display coverart, fanart, artist thumbs anything really.