Glossary or "Must Read" posts

[bfauska]

Anybody,

I'm new to XLobby and would love to learn how to unlock it's potential as a frontend to my home theater. I am particularly intrested in using it for playing back locally stored DVDs and music from my hdd. I also am interested in using it for internet radio, photo slide shows, rss/weather and game emulators.

I know that XLobby is incredibly customizeable, and would love to learn how to use it to it's fullest. I have a fairly solid background in computers and learn quickly but don't know where to start.

I have already installed XLobby and made it play movies from my small library with a few different skins but can't figure out a few things.

I want to be able to play a movie's trailer from the screen that describes it to me, and can't figure out how to do that. It looks like some of the skins support it, I just don't know where is best to put my trailers and how to get XLobby to associate the correct trailer with the movie.

That's the problem that is bugging me most, but in general I would like to have a greater understanding of XLobby as a whole. If there were some sort of glossary and essential reading I could be pointed in the direction of that would be great. I have tried to look around the forums but most of the posts seem to be very problem-specific. I would like to have a basic understanding of events, parameters, databases, and how they all work together. I am sure that I left some stuff out too.

ANY help at all would be great, even if it is as basic or daunting as "You need to learn to program in blah, blah, blah language"

Thanks in advance.

Brian

[bfauska]

Well, I figured out how to get my trailers working...mostly. I was using the colby skin and found some directory differences and the like in the events associated with trailers.

My problem now is that when I run a trailer it shows in the top right corner where the little trailer box is, but it is too big, and zoomplayer runs like a program in a window. It looks like the video is supposed to fit into that little blue box in the corner, and I imagine that it would look best without the zoomplayer window border showing. I have tried to send different size settings to zp in the event command but can't get it any smaller. I figure it is a zp setting but I don't know what to look for. If somebody who has the trailers working in this fashion (COLBY?) could give me some pointers that would be great. I may just decide to run trailers fullscreen anyway but would still like to know why this isn't working.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

[Colby]

bfauska,
this is the old school way of doing trailers. It is done with command lines sent to zoomplayer. The zp screen position is set in the arguments of the event. So is the size I think. To remove the border of the ZP window config ZP skin without boarders. This all works with a 1024x768 skin, any variation of resolution will have to be customized.

There is a better way to do trailers now, I am just too busy to implement it.

[bfauska]

Thanks Colby, I'll try to play with my ZP settings.


I think I'm done with MyHTPC now, XLobby is just way too customizable to walk away from.


Later,
Brian