MPBlue PPC client release 0.0.4 (2 Viewers)

[ZetaVu]

Ok, good to hear (for the most part). I'm going to adjust mu unknown files to have an album called unknown to see ho wthat affects me. I can always delete that album name (for those 2,000 files) later if it gives me trouble.

Hopefully the MP devs can fis the issue with fullscreen, is there a place I (or we for others here) can voice our requests as well, maybe move it along?)

Let me know when you update the changes and I'll play with the skins some more.

 

[MrSensitive]

The External display plugin is also suffering from this.

I made a post there to indicate we are having the same issue..
JoeDalton is a Mediaportal developer, so I think a fix might be possible..

 

[ZetaVu]

Quick update on my unknown album workarounds. For those just arriving, MP has two ways of dealing with unknown albums (no album listed in mp3 id3 tags), if you set the switch "treat tracks in individual folders as an album" on when you make or update a database, all the tracks in that folder (without album tag) will be listed under an album named unknown. MPBlue does not display the contents of this pseudoalbum in the media library. If you do not check that box, each song is treated in a separate pseudoalbum named unknown. MPBlue works fine with this but it is a pain since you have a ton of albums named unknown with one song each in them.

Since this is also a common problem with the media control program media library, I figured in the short term it might be better to put in artificial album names. My goal is to do it in a way so that it can be done and reversed quickly with little effort.

Method 1 - name all as Unknown in album tag. FOr this I just used wmp10, went to album view and all the unknown albums by all artist were bunched together. I went to edit tags and told all that they were from album Unknown. If I want to reverse, open all with album Unknown and delete album info.

Result - in artist view, there is one album called unknown where songs are now visible in both MPBlue and MP. In album view however, there are dozens of albums called Unknown, one for each artist that has unknown albums, containing as many songs for that artist as are in unknown, sometimes 1, sometimes a dozen. there is no way to distinguish the unknown albums in album view, so it becomes a useless hunk of info.

Method 2 - for this I want to name the albums by the band name rather than just unknown. For this, I use an intellignet tag editor like Musicmatch (or whatever can do it this way). In album view, I select all songs with unknown album, go to Supertagging>tags from filenames. I set it to take the album name from title and all albums names are set to band name (my files are set as band - song.mp3 if no album present. Before I save this I have to set a common tag, either preference, mood or tempo (I don't use these). Later if I want to reverse this and remove the album name, I view by whatever that tag was. My entire music collection except these files would be misc. for that tag, and I can edit all those tags in one swoop.

Results, you have to surrender one of those tags, otherwise the album name is the band name, works in artist view and in album view, you have all the albums that were unknown now named as the band name.

Negative on both of these is there are a bunch of "fake" albums in album view, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. When I view albums in MP, I like to view thumbnails and mostly only albums that have most of the songs if not all. I might label albums as zzz instead of unknown so they would be at the bottom (just after zztop), and maybe I can work out a way to label then zzzartist.

Ideally, it would be nice to have mpblue to handle the unknown albums from folders, and ignore these completely in album view. Till then, this is at least workable and hopefully will keep MrSensitive from being distracted from more pressing matters.

 

[fathead]

Well RTV seems to have fixed one of the issues if my understanding is correct.

 

[MrSensitive]

Zeta, thanks for investigating this..
much appreciated, I will lay of the album artist stuff for a while and focus on the other stuff that needs to be done..

FatHead;
yup, so it would seem... Will try this tonight with the latest cvs..

 

[Fredrik]

Hi,

I installed MPBlue on a Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX. This device has a VGA display and I guess that this resolution will be more common than QVGA in the future. The MPBlue PPC client is displayed in a quarter of the screen. I haven't experienced this problem with other PPC apps that seem to work in both QVGA & VGA devices. Does anybody know how to use MPBlue PPC client in VGA?

I think it is very nice to use a PDA as remote due to the brilliant touch screen and no need of “line of sight”, using WLAN. Good initiative!!

 

[MrSensitive]

Frederik,

currently the skin is designed for 240x320.

You might want to try to resize the background.png file to 480x640.
and see if that uses the full screen estate..

the buttons will still be occupying only a quarter of the screen...

while writing this i started to think that somewhere in the code a backbuffer is created using 320x240... so it will probably not work..

let me put this on the list of things to do...

EDIT:
nope, it should work.. just resize or replace the current background.png image

regards

 

[ZetaVu]

You can also edit the xml file to change the positions and sizes of each individual button, while tedious it shouldn't take that long and then you can move your buttons wherever you want.

 

[mzemina]

I've seen a picture of a new remote control from Logitech, the Harmony 1000. Take a look here:

Take a look at the icons - I'm not promoting stealing, but for ideas for similar icons which could be created for the MPBlue PPC client, it can't help but provide inspiration. I like the title of that screen: "What would you like to do?" Nice moniker! The six icons/buttons: Watch TV, Watch a DVD, Record a Video, Play a Game, Listen to Radio, My Pictures - all would be great for the home screen, they are large enough to recgnize and the text below each icon/button is descriptive.

 

[buster]

"now playing" stays blank

First of all --great work-- !!!!!
Is there any known problem with the "now playing" srcreen on mpblue ???
(Dell x51v) I adjusted the Imagesize and position in the xml file for the VGA resolution. Everything works fine !!! Only the now playing screen is empty the buttoms are shown but the other stuff is missing.
I have no idea
for the Help