Naylia's XLobbyMC Skin - Updated 1 JANUARY 2006 www

[Naylia]

You'll have to wait and see on games, there are some folks working a cool plugin that I can't talk about much, since I don't know much but I decided to wait till they finish their work.

I know you can do it yourself. I figured out how to build screens by looking at prexisting ones in other skins and then emulating / modifying what they did to start till I got a handle on everything.

[Naylia]

v1.02 Changelog
-The following ppc events now load the 'My TV' control screen after being pushed:
...Library
...Guide
...My TV
...Recorded TV
-Music:Mini-Now-Playing Added
-Music:Controls - Volume Added
-Shutdown Screen added
...Minimize
...Close
...Restart
...Shutdown
-Many miscellaneous bug fixes in the way some events are handled! (I don't remember them but I know I made a bunch)

I'm hoping to release 'My Games' addon next...but if it looks like it won't happen in the next week or so I'll probably start on 'My Radio'

Also added a comment about integrating with SageClient to the 1st post.

[Chazotta]

Naylia,

Great to see volume control and minimise funtion. The only thing with volume is that it might be good to have a % indicator so that the user knows how much headroom (or lack of it) there is.

I will try and get my head around the send message commands so that I can integrate the TV application that I use. How hard can it be ?

regards

[Naylia]

good idea, i'll see if I can dummy up a bar to go in there somwhere in the next release

it's easy to modify the skin for your new sendmessage commands, i can walk you through it if you've tracked down the paramaters and commands for your program

[lovingHDTV]

I got my usb-uirt so now I'm looking into getting this all working.

One question about your SageMC setup. Did you modify the dynamic menu within Sage and remove the top menu? If not, and you hit back repeatedly what menu is you top menu? I was thinking about changing my top menu to be a button you hit to bring you back to Xlobby, otherwise I'm afraide my wife/children will never remember to go back to Xlobby for music, etc.

How do you handle this part? It would seem that we need to get Sage to swap back to Xlobby when you leave the guide, tv, or recordings screens.

Maybe I'mjust missing something.

thanks,

[briands]

Thanks to the long weekend, I'm getting around to setting this up... Finally.

One possible feature request... When I go to "My TV" and Sage client is not running, I get an error. Could you just have it launch sage instead of giving the error? Or give the error with the option "Do you want to launch Sage?"

[Naylia]

Sorry I've been slow to respond guys, I wasted my Mem Day weekend sick

LovingHD...I handled it with the IR commands. If you use the 'Menu' IR command it will take you to the main xlobby menu, and if you use the 'My TV' ir command trigger it will take you to the SageMC 'My TV' menu. And then on the off chance that you get dumped int he SageMC main menu I removed all the buttons except for settings and MyTV.


briands...I'll think about this, right now it really expects Sage to be running already. I'm not sure how to do an if/then statement, and I don't want to always have it try to start sage if it's already running. hmm i wonder what happens if i try to launch two instances of Sage. Maybe it just won't, some programs work like that. I'll look into it this week. You could modify your setup to always start and shutdown the client, if you're looking for some solution like that to save resources. I could walk you through that.

[briands]

Sorry you were sick, me too. Damn sinuses...

Most of the time I'll have SAGE running. I have it setup to run full screen on startup. When I turn off "screen saver on sleep" though, it minimizes, is that what it should do?

And now for the dumb question.... I want to use a remote for this at least for now. How do I get the IR codes into the equation? Do I need to unlink all of the sage commands first? If you could walk me through this, (or point me to an existing explanation).

Thanks again, I think my wife will love the improved music handling.

[Naylia]

You don't need to unlink the codes. You should just be able to turn them off in the IR screen in sage.

But first question first...are you using a usb-uirt? Because right now thats the only one xlobby can handle natively. The use of a different ir reciever would require girder. LovingHD has some experience with that I think. He's still here so I'm hoping he got it worked out.

You want XLobby and Sage to both load on startup. XLobby on top of Sage.

Here's a writeup I did over at Sage...

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE IR SETUP AT ALL...
-Copy the 'ir' folder from XLobbyMC.zip into your XLobby directory (often 'c:\program files\xlobby')
-Allow it to overwrite...this will replace you existing XLobby ir commands with a template to learn against using a usb-uirt and remote of your choice.
-Open XLobby and press 'F2' to enter setup
-Goto the 'IR Plugin' tab.
-Make sure 'IR Plugin' is set to USB-UIRT
-Under 'Device' choose (xlobby) xlobby-xlobby-xlobby instead of (c) c-c-c.
-Hopefully you have lots of commands in the list box now.
-To learn commands from your remote...
.....click a command
.....click 'Set' next to ID:
.....push the button on your remote you want to assign
.....click 'Learn'
.....hold down the button on your remote you want to learn till it reaches 100%
-There you go command learned!

Command Definitions (for those that are not obvious)
-Exit (SageTV back button...I suppose I should call it Back)
-Menu (Sends XLobby to Main Menu and gives XLobby focus..works in XLobby and Sage)
-My TV (sends Sage to My TV screen and gives Sage focus...works in XLobby and Sage)
-Next / Previous are the FF2/RW2
-Settings (In XLobby goes to Settings screen, in Sage goes to Sage Settings screen)

-Commands that have dual/triple function will work differently in different parts of XLobby. If you start a movie in ZP 'Next' skips chapters. If you're listening to music, 'Next' is next song, if your're in Sage it's whatever FF2 is for you.

That should cover IR commands I think...

let me know if that does it for you

oh and minimizing is fine, when you kick the ir codes in i find that the only time I ever see the sage main menu is when a tv show ends, since the menu button on the remote is setup to goto xlobby's menu but shouldn't actually need to minimize it, you just don't want it bringing up that screensaver ontop of xlobby. I use sendfocus which you have to put at c:\ to switch between the two programs. When in sage an you push menu it brings xlobby to the front and when you select the 'my tv' button it brings sage to the front and sends it to the 'my tv' screen.

[lovingHDTV]

I did get Girder to work with Xlobby and the solution is posted under the support forum. It is very tedious and not very fun

Now, from my understanding if Naylia could support the new XRemote plugin, I believe the setup would be similar to setting up IR support. I'm not positive about this, but you could read more on the XRemote plugin thread.

I ended up buying a USB-UIRT, because everyone supports it and I can also use it to control my stereo, projectore etc via the PDA.

[Naylia]

I'll take a look at XRemote and see what I need to do.

[Naylia]

Just for myself...things to do....

Net Radio
XRemote
Volume Bar

[briands]

Very dangerous posting your to do list in such a public place. You'll have people adding to it

[exdirtfarmer]

Drink several Guinness
Drink several more Guinness.

[Chazotta]

Naylia

Thanks for the offer to walk me through getting my TV application to integrate with xlobby.

The application has keyboard shortcuts for almost every function. Is it therefore possible to shortcut the whole event assigning process, by simply assigning the relevant keyboard shortcut to the specific buttons in xlobby (ie: rather than finding the specific send command parameters) ? Is it possible to create an event in xlobby which can assign keyboard shortcut commands ? To my understanding, provided xlobby is able to make the TV application the active application then the relevant keyboard shortcut will trigger the relevant event in the TV application.

If not, how would I find the sendmessage commands for the TV application.

Just so you know the application is called DNTV Live and is designed to be Sage like. http://www.digitalnow.com.au/dntvlive/index.html

regards