sassari - widescreen skin

[reven]

oh and once you have one of the plugins skinned (ie the "my series" part) you can skin the rest in a few minutes, i did my programs in less than 5 minutes.

once you have the "my series" done (which may take a little whilte , lots and lots of options) let me know if you need help.

[dottore]

i skinned the actual "new" my pictures from the wiki, which uses a central my-series skin-file and other options in the my pictures-folder. it was quite easy: a bit of work in the my series-folder, the my pictures-folder was done in 2 minutes.

ok, i will skin the release candidates from your website as soon as i'm done with the basic plugins. currently i am skinning the recordings-screen and i am sure it will take me more than the next few days to do the rest (osd, net radio, .....) so there is no need to send me download links or files, i will just download them from your fixed homepage next week or so.

thanks for the help.

[fbachofner]

that's right. but plasma is a "bad" technology: a few hours of ntv, n24, bbc-ticker at the bottom of the screen and you will have a dark line in your picture. don't know how it is called in english, but we in germany call it a burnt in picture....

Well, I wouldn't call it "bad," exactly. There are just some things one has to watch out for. In the US, we call it "eingebrannt," which loosely translates to "burned in."

Wait a minute, are my Swiss roots showing?! . . .

the bad scaling of lcd's is a well-known problem and there is no solution. the pixels are not round (plasmas and crt's have round pixels), therefore the picture seems supersharp and you see EVERY little error on the screen.

Picture quality is the single most important issue here, so I would submit this is why plasma (or CRT) is significantly better than LCD for television viewing -- especially when you consider there will be multi-resolution sources for YEARS to come.

Until better scaling technology is built into each LCD unit, it's just not worth it to see those ghastly interpolated images.

Fortunately there are other (presumably better) technologies (i.e. OLED, FED, etc) headed our way anyways . . .

[dottore]

ok, here is a zip-file, containing the actual skin. this is NOT a release-version, it is not even beta. following is working:

- music lib
- video lib
- photo lib
- tv guide
- recordings
- main menu

i hope, someone will try this unfinished skin and find some errors in the above mentioned plugins (osd is NOT working). i want to know, if

- the fonts are too small, too big
- the text is un-/readable on the background
- the tv-out on widescreen-tv's looks good/bad
- the performance is ok/bad
- i forgot something while skinning.

thanks! and: i LOVE screenshots ;-)

currently i am working on the search-guide. next steps: fm radio, net radio, system, osd, live-guide...

[limiter]

I tried out the skin and there are a few problems with fonts going off screen, and some tv guide channels have garbled text for some reason (see my screenshots). Also in the tv guide the date seems to run into the hour at the top (also see screenshots for example). To answer some of your questions:

Fonts are fine, I can read them 14FT away on a 46in Widescreen TV with 1248X692 resolution.

Text is readable on the background.

It looks amazing on my TV, very crisp.

Performance is decent for me. There are a few times it took about 3-4 seconds to go from one button to the next, but it was not the norm. I have an AMD Sempron 3000+ with 1GB ram, and an ATI X1600PRO.

I am linking to some screenshots, they are big (in resolution, not file size).

Screenshot 1: Notice the Mon mixing with the 3:00 at the top. Also the garbled stations 16 and 17. On the right the title doesn't fit (I found this to be the case with many titles): http://robotsafe.com/sassari1.jpg

Screenshot 2: Just showing the more info part in the TV Guide: http://robotsafe.com/sassari2.jpg

Screenshot 3: Video Library, if you look the "Goldfrapp Album Chart Show" is my longest name and usually in the normal skin just disappears off the edge, but you can see it kind of continue below it. On a side note please ignore my strange mix of music videos, sometimes I wonder why I even have these videos. http://robotsafe.com/sassari3.jpg

Screenshot 4: Photo Library, easily the worst performing part of GBPVR with the Sassari skin, but not terrible enough that I wouldn't use it and mostly the delay is going from viewing a photo back to the menu. http://robotsafe.com/sassari4.jpg

Screenshot 5: This is just the recordings page. I didn't see problems there, but I didn't really have a lot of long file names available. http://robotsafe.com/sassari5.jpg

Thanks for all the work on this!

[dottore]

ups, i forgot to pack the font with the release. in the next release, there will be a font-file.

screenshot 1: is this a sassari-only phenomenon? i can only set the position of the timePeriods-element....
concerning stations 16 and 17: this may be font-related. at least i hope!
the title on the right must be corrected, thanks for pointing this out.

screenshot 2: well, looks ok, i think

screenshot 3: this cannot be fixed, the video library lacks a few skinning features. the next gbpvr-version will have an updated library.

screenshot 4: looks good! the performance is a problem though....i could send you a version without overlays, could you try this new version please?

screenshot 5: the error with the small text is corrected.

thanks for testing! now, i must get some sleep, tomorrow i will upload a new version of the skin with the font and a few bugfixes.

[limiter]

I will try the next release. I only see the problem in Sassari (for screenshot 1), but maybe the font will help this. The screenshot 3 problem isn't a big deal, most people probably won't have file names that long.

I can try one without overlays and see how it runs, no problem there.

I will try out the new version you post tomorrow. I don't use the Music or FM radio plugins (I do use Internet radio), but I can enable those to check them out as well.

[pbb]

I would love a widescreen skin. Like the color in the first picture.

[dottore]

thanks, limiter.

i have attached a zip-file containing the skin and the font now. no other changes for now except one thing: the photo library comes without the overlay. thanks for testing!

[limiter]

I tried Sassari with the font and most problems were fixed. The photos page was significantly faster for me, I think I would keep it with the change.

I took more screen shots to show a few minor issues that you might want to address:

Screenshot 6: You can see the Tue/04 still seems rather close to the 11:00AM, and the channel names (USA, LIFE) are very close to the bottom edge, seems like it might be good to raise that up a little. I am not seeing the problem with garbled text anymore. http://robotsafe.com/sassari6.jpg

Screenshot 7: The font fixed the text appearing on the second line in the video library, this looks good. http://robotsafe.com/sassari7.jpg

Screenshot 8: The main menu: The "Recording Soon" part seems like it doesn't have enough room. Many recording soon times go off so it can say "8:00 PM -" with no end time. The titles often go off the screen. I don't know if this can be improved without moving it to the left. At the top you can see the date runs into the time on the main menu as well. http://robotsafe.com/sassari8.jpg

Still looks amazing, thanks again for all your work on this.