Progress: MP 2 development status - 2011-01-25 (1 Viewer)

Albert

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  • February 18, 2008
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    Hi and welcome to the current MP2 development status report!

    Until the last status report, we were able to achieve very much. The work in the main MP2 system was mainly in the core and SkinEngine areas, so for that part, you don't see much in the GUI. But morpheus also added a new theme and he wrote plugins which can be seen in the "incubator" directory and he worked at his new plugin in an own branch.

    Here's a list of things which have been done:

    Baboonanza's work:
    • Added customizable image transitions (both for general GUI use and for the PicturePlayer).
    • Added asyncronous texture loading (default is still syncronous, asyncronous must be specified by the skinner).
    • Numerous SkinEngine fixes for the Picture player.
    • Fixed remaining opacity mask issues. This involved changing GUI blending to Porter-Duff compositing.
    • Added support for screen open/close animation (currently in a branch but might get committed before the end of the month).
    • Fixed incorrect handling of missing skins.

    Morpheus' work:
    • Fixed problems with the stream selection in the VideoPlayer.
    • Use full color range in EVR presenter.
    • Added new theme "Dark Silver".
    • Added sample plugin BackgroundManager to incubator. It allows to specify an image name according to the selected item in the main menu (for Music, Picture, Videos...), which will be shown in the background.
    • Added a sample theme "Black Backdrop" that includes screens from "3D backgrounds" thread here in forum.
    • Slim TV (branch): Interface definitions are WiP, timeshifting, program info is working,
    • GUI supports: Channel group / channel selection (channel logos are used), single channel guide, experimental multichannel guide,
    • The SlimTV GUI now supports PiP correctly, all OSD / CP screens now are showing the right channel/program infos.

    Bavarian's work:
    • Replaced old logging module by log4net

    Albert's work:
    • Updated all file headers to 2011 :)
    • Added VirtualizingStackPanel. Improves setup and rendering time for big lists in the GUI.
    • Reworked data string creation/handling for lists. Those data strings are necessary to support keyboard navigation in lists by pressing the first letter.
    • Use new VirtualizingStackPanel in content menus.
    • Improved the SkinEngine's layouting system for the case where many UIElements are present.
    • Improved setup and disposal phases of UIElements.
    • Improved some style assignments/element copies. We need to do much less copies now. Some improvements for the type converter.
    • Fixed BuildReport tool.
    • Renamed template screens: master to master_bare, master_dialog to master_dialog_bare.
    • Fixed display of preview images for skins and themes in configuration dialogs.
    • Fixed problems mixing resources of the default language with localized strings of another language (thx for Smeulf's help!).
    • Fixed some problems with the SystemName class (thx to Smeulf!).
    • Added support for byte[] data type in MediaLibrary & infrastructure.
    • Fixed some problems with unsupported SQL functions. Relocate media items works now.
    • Fixed threading problem in VideoBrush which made it's skin neutral AR sometimes not calculated correctly in OSD PiP.
    • Improved XAML parser search for attached properties.
    • Fixed Panel ZIndex handling.
    • Reworked the resource access module. Fixed several problems accessing local and remote resources which could occur under certain conditions.
    • Improved transparent resource background transfer. Reworked internal state model of BackgroundHttpDataTransfer class.
    • Increased deadlock abort timeout in WorkflowManager to 10 seconds.
    • Improved resource/thread usage of PlayerControl elements which are not part of an active screen.
    • Avoid saving a playlist with the same name as an already existing playlist (thx to Smeulf!)
    • Several more SkinEngine, core, skin and other reworks and bugfixes.

    Also thanks to all other contributors which have not been named here. Thanks to all testers who reported bugs, especially to Smeulf who reported quite many bugs.


    I guess I should really write progress reports more often... :)

    Cheers,
    Albert
     

    Ponyriemen

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    AW: Progress: MP 2 development status - 2011-01-25

    ...when will be there the first Release? ;)

    P.S.: keep on working, you all are doing a great Job! Thanks for that!

    Pony
     

    mbuzina

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    I guess I should really write progress reports more often... :)

    Yes please! Thanks for the great effort.

    I wonder a bit about the SlimTV branch. In the last progress report you (or someone else) mentioned that TV was not (yet) a priority for MP 2 and that the first alpha release would be without TV. So did that change?
     

    DieBagger

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    I guess I should really write progress reports more often... :)

    Yes please! Thanks for the great effort.

    I wonder a bit about the SlimTV branch. In the last progress report you (or someone else) mentioned that TV was not (yet) a priority for MP 2 and that the first alpha release would be without TV. So did that change?

    There won't be a new Tv-Server for MP2 that hasn't changed unfortunately. But there will (most likely) be a client for the existing tv-server.
     

    DieBagger

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    Ah, great. So why should MP 2 get a new TV Server? What are the plans there?

    Same reason why mp2 development was started: to get a fresh start. The code of tvserver has come to a point where even small changes require lot of work and testing.
     

    naich

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    Hi Albert!

    Thanks for your progress report ... and of course you should write progress reports more often :D ...


    But there will (most likely) be a client for the existing tv-server

    This ist an important decision, I'm pretty sure with TV part included, MP2 will be used much more often!


    cu and thanks
     

    BlackBurn

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    Very cool! I like status reports, it is like a slow moving traffic jam; it is a pity that the endpoint is far away, but at least there is still movement :)
     

    jmbillings

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    Thanks for the update- I may take a look at MP2 - I was using MP1 for ages but I eventually started using WMC7 on my main htpc as the TV server seemed to be the unreliable part of MP :( - I had issues with it crashing, especially with a weak DVB-S signal... to the point it would crash the whole PC :( WMC7 is much better in this respect, and recovers from a bad signal the same as an STB.

    I still check here sometimes to see the progress as MP is nicer other than that!
     

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