Want to develop a 3d side by side gui plugin, is my idea possible? (2 Viewers)

snakeman65

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Re: 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?

I'm just using defaultwide at the moment. I guess the first step would be to do the videoFullScreen.xml and work back from there. Time to read the skin documentation...
 

MrCrabs

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

Hmm, I just had a look at Default Wide and there is one problem: I think ypu can't squeeze fonts, but that could be managed by a new narrow font. Try getting some picture floating in front of your video. Give me 5 minutes and I will post a custom xml to see if it works at all.
 

MrCrabs

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

Alright, try this file out. Put it in the defaultwide folder and don't forget to safe (rename) your original file!

Then open MP and start a SBS Movie and open the osd, so far you should see the old one, but once you press the up button to show up extra info you should see the Radiotime logo (just because its square and that makes it easy) hovering in front of your video.

View attachment common.expanded.video.osd.xml
 

snakeman65

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

Alright, try this file out. Put it in the defaultwide folder and don't forget to safe (rename) your original file!

Then open MP and start a SBS Movie and open the osd, so far you should see the old one, but once you press the up button to show up extra info you should see the Radiotime logo (just because its square and that makes it easy) hovering in front of your video.

View attachment 89496

Unfortuately I don't seem to have the radiotime logo on my install! However, I changed it do the 'hover_play disc.png' file and it sort of works. The separation is really wide so its quite hard to focus on, it kind of looks to be way out in front of the tv that might be because I changed the image however. The concept is good though just needs a little tweaking!
 

MrCrabs

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Oh, that logo seems to be onstalled with radiotime, my bad. But it works. You can change the distance by editing the xml by yourself. All you need to change is the x position. I squeezed both images to 115 and placed them in the middle of one half (640) with an offset of 22.5 to the screens middle. So if you decrease the left image's posx by 22 and increase the right one's by 22 it will be on the same level as the video.
Imwould do it but I already shut off my laptop and am now using my ipad.

So it is possible to make your idea work, but still there is the problem of the font which you can't just squeeze and there should be some kind of detection to automstically switch from normal to SBS.
 

snakeman65

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Oh, that logo seems to be onstalled with radiotime, my bad. But it works. You can change the distance by editing the xml by yourself. All you need to change is the x position. I squeezed both images to 115 and placed them in the middle of one half (640) with an offset of 22.5 to the screens middle. So if you decrease the left image's posx by 22 and increase the right one's by 22 it will be on the same level as the video.
Imwould do it but I already shut off my laptop and am now using my ipad.

So it is possible to make your idea work, but still there is the problem of the font which you can't just squeeze and there should be some kind of detection to automstically switch from normal to SBS.

I think that detection will be very difficult unless its on filename or something like that. Recreating fonts also sounds like a challenge but stretched text wouldn't necessarily be a show-stopper.

I'm going to do a little more investigation down the plugin/MP Patch route as if its possible it would potentially be a more elegant solution as it would work for any skin without making custom files. I suspect that given my limited time and knowledge that it will prove impossible though so the skin route might be my only choice.

Thanks for your help
 

MrCrabs

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No problem, but I guess your initial idea of having a plugin doing the job is way better and easier if I think of all those xmls that need to be changed. But programming is something I have barely an idea of, so maybe someone else might help you here.

I am going to go to bed now. See you later.
 

ajp8164

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Hi all,

A few thoughts on how one might tackle this problem in a general way. First, I know absolutely nothing about 3D TVs or the different schemes available. However, if the job is to (as stated in this thread) duplicate the whole GUI and then to scale both left and right sides to be able to place them side by side then here is what I think...

From an MP1 architecture perspective you do not want any of this to be done by the skin engine. The skin engine should, ideally, be completely unaware of what's going on. Having this design/architectural constraint will cause lots of problems to simply go away (like the font problem mentioned in this thread). It is better to handle this type of work at a low level of the architecture - in the case of MP1 the best place is likely at the D3D manipulation layer. All rendering for MP1 is accomplished using the FontEngine.cpp library of functions. All of this code is written in C++. If you're really interested in pulling this off I suggest you become a D3D (and C++) expert at some level. I know enough (learned along the way) about D3D to have made some changes and additions to the FontEngine but tackling something like this is beyond my current skill. You'll likely have to understand how the D3D drawing space is managed and take advantage of hardware acceleration to be able to perform the scaling for you (otherwise performance of MP1 could be miserable).

Sorry I don't have more specifics and that I'm not an expert in D3D to guide you but this, I think, is where you want to focus your attention. Depending on how the video is rendered into the frame at the D3D layer you may also look at how the layer manager works as stated in this thread. The combination of knowing how these two things (at least) should move the idea and an implementation down the road.

Good luck. I'll follow this thread and respond if there is anything more I can add that may help...
 

sunfire7

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Very interesting thread, Im interested in a side by side GUI too, I hope in future versions at least the info and topbar can be side by side, unfortunately I dont have the skills to even help
 

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