Want to develop a 3d side by side gui plugin, is my idea possible? (1 Viewer)

[snakeman65]

I've had an idea for a plugin that would help out users of 3d TVs (including me of course!) in side by side mode. I'm completely new to media portal development but i'm a C# Web Developer by trade so i'm hoping i'll pick it up quickly. My idea is this:

I want a plugin that will take the entire gui, squash it to half width and duplicate it to the other side of the screen but without duplicating the video playing behind. This way, when a 3dTV is put into side by side mode it will feed the gui to both eyes instead of splitting it between each eye and thus you'll have the MP gui floating above the 3d video. I'm not aware of any other media players that can do this so I think it would be a major coup for MP with the increase in home 3dTV and SBS films/shows.

Unfortunately I just don't know where to start! I've been through the initial tutorial (which could do with a little updating for 1.2.0) but I just do know where to go from there. Could I achieve this with the plugin architecture or would it need to be part of a skin or a mixture of both? Is it even possible? Can anyone give me any pointers?

Thanks

Chris

 

[MaxMan23]

AW: Want to develop a 3d side by side gui plugin, is my idea possible?

Hi Snakeman, lets work on the mp3d. Maybe ScRePt can give us the source code.

 

[snakeman65]

Re: AW: Want to develop a 3d side by side gui plugin, is my idea possible?

Hi Snakeman, lets work on the mp3d. Maybe ScRePt can give us the source code.

Unfortunately the MP3D code wouldn't really help with my particular problem. Until media portal can use alternative video renderers i'm not going to be able to get it to output the format I need. This way would be better anyway because it will work for any 3dtvs and would also provide potential to make the actual MP gui 3d. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any sign of help

 

[tourettes]

Sounds pretty radical change how the Skin Engine would renderer. Basicly you would need to renderer all other GUI components twice (with X-postion offset) than the video layer. GUILayerManager could be a starting point.

I'm not that familiar with the Skin Engine, but the task doesn't sound like an easy one.

 

[snakeman65]

Thanks tourettes. At least I have some kind of starting point now. Time to have a poke through the MP sources to see how GUILayerManager works!

 

[miroslav22]

Interesting idea but as above I think it would be extremely difficult (probably almost impossible) to implement in MP1.

The gui engine would probably need a vast rework as you would need to calculate 2 viewpoints for the 3d effect.

 

[snakeman65]

It doesn't have to have a 3d effect (though it would of course be cool) it just needs to be repeated exactly the same either side of the screen. My other option is I guess to make a skin with 2 sets of each element in it but I don't yet know enough about how skins work to know if this would be possible.

 

[MrCrabs]

AW: Want to develop a 3d side by side gui plugin, is my idea possible?

Simply squashing it and doubling it will not make it float above the movie, will it? You need to offset both a little towards the middle to make it float above or am I wrong?
Without doublicating the gui you will have it messed up anyway, won't you? Or maybe my 3D imagination is just too bad this evening.

Just doing a doubled gui is easy, but having that is switchable between SBS and normal view is not that easy. But I guess you could do such an implementation just by editing a skin without writing any plugin.

 

[snakeman65]

As long as it's squashed and both sides it will at least be in one piece! I think that if they are both in exactly the same position they will be at the level of the tv. Most of the bits of 3D movies seem to be behind the tv with a little coming out of the screen. I might make a photoshop mock up and see how it will look on my tv.

At the moment the whole gui is split between the eyes due to the tv mixing the left and right side of the screen together, its pretty headache inducing!

 

[MrCrabs]

AW: Want to develop a 3d side by side gui plugin, is my idea possible?

I think you should just go ahead an try out if it is woring all right by just editing your skin, I can help you with that but I don't have no 3Dtv to test. What skin are you using?