Picture viewer plugin

[ecruos]

http://www.tidegreen.com/downloads/GBPVR...Plugin.zip

To install the plugin, you need to copy the Pictures directories into the appropriate skins subdirectories (and the dll into the plugins directory).  Remember to configure the plugin to specify your images directory.

Any comments or suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks sub for enabling the remaining remote control buttons!


Ecruos

[sub]

I'll take a look after work.

[gplasky]

Nice plugin.
1. When set to "My pictures" directory which has 12 subfollders and about 300 picture images total I get an "out of memory" error when I choose your program.
2. When I click on an image I get one that fills the screen. The only way to get to the next one is with the arrow key. So I am assuming this is a work in progress. Because I really don't see the slideshow function of it yet or any slideshow button or settings.

Keep up the good work. I like it. Think about different transistions in the slideshow and maybe a way for background music too.

Gerry

[CodeMonkey]

If you are pre-loading all the images (why he ran out of memory?) you might consider only pre-loading the next one. So you would display the current one, and as the user is looking in admiration of his/her picture, you load the next one as a optimization.

Nice start!

[gplasky]

And just to let you know I have 1GB of RAM so memory shouldn't be an issue. You might want to consider having your plugin create a thumbnail directory to store all the thumbnails of the pictures. That way it wouldn't have to reread them all the time and it wouldn't have to try to store all the images in memory? Just a thought and I'm no programmer.

Gerry

[sub]

Well done. It looks like a great start. I didn't experience the 'out of memory' error mentioned above, but did notice a couple of slow downs loading the page of thumbnails - so some caching strategy is probably in order.


Suggestions:
- Might also be preferrable to black out the background before drawing the fullsize picture. The background can be distracting.

- Small text in the corner of the screen saying the directory position (eg: 30 of 35) might be good when viewing the directory/slideshow.

- Button to rotate the image.

[ecruos]

Thanks all for your comments, I will try to implement your suggestions as I can.

re: gplasky's error, I don't preload the images.  What has seemed to cause memory errors in the past is loading files of an unexpected type.

Maybe one of the first 30 thumbnail images, is an unusual format TIF/GIF/PNG or JPG?  Anyway I should be able to trap the error to make it "go away".

Regarding the slow list screen, I have avoided creating thumbnail files because they could soon number thousands, and take up many megabytes and I don't like to create "clutterware" :-)  I must see if I can think of another way.

Ecruos

[Guest]

Hi,

Superb plug-in.

I have a couple of suggestions for improvements:

1) When displaying the folders within the 'Pictures' directory, it would be nice to have the option to display the folders as a list of folder names rather than as icons (like it does in the Music/Video libraries).

Ideally this would use the 'Use Icon View for media libraries' setting from the main 'Misc' GBPVR configuration tab, but a specific one for the 'Pictures' plugin would also do.

2) When displaying the folders within the 'Pictures' directory, it would be nice to have a setting for the sort order. The folders seem to get displayed according to their modified dates whereas I'd prefer them to be alphabetical.

3) The pictures within each folder are also displayed according to their modified dates rather than alphabetically, again a setting for this would be great.

A single setting would suit me fine, but maybe others would require both.

4) Rename the 'Pictures' icon to 'Picture Library' to make it more in line with the 'Music Library' and 'Video Library'.

I also have an intermittant problem when going to the 'Pictures' folder list. It sometimes displays a blank screen rather than the folder icons, going back to the menu and re-entering the 'Pictures' folder list seems to solve the problem, but it's rather annoying.

I've not been able to reproduce this reliably as yet though.

Thanks for a great plug-in.

Neil
===

[ecruos]

http://www.tidegreen.com/downloads/GBPVR...Plugin.zip

New release... Added basic video support, which is nice for viewing modern digital camera output on the computer, but less good with MediaMVP which doesn't support AVI.  If you play an AVI on the MVP, nothing will happen until the duration of the AVI has ellapsed.  To stop any video playing (including the invisible AVIs) press "Stop" then "Back".

pbj: When I render the thumbnails screen, I open as many images as will be visible on that screen to draw the preview.  This will unfortunately be slower if the images to display are larger sizes, which may lead to the MVP crashing.  This release allows you to reduce the number of thumbnails displayed... a half-way solution, I know

Neil: Good list! I'll see what I can do in the next release.

Ecruos

[pbj]

Ecruos,

Top work, halfway house is great for me...

Small suggestion (not v important). When scrolling up or down I presume you recreate all the thumbnails on the screen (since the time take to render is about the same as when you go in to a new directory).
Can this be speeded up by caching or (simpler solution) can you add a "page down" button?