2011-04-16, 15:01
I'm just starting my first XBMC plugin which will - with any luck and a bit of graft - pull accurate data from the Australian Beaurea of Meteorology....as weather.com data for downunder is sucky.
The first stage is a basic plugin to pull the rader image loops. Basically, this is a group of cycled images, say 4 of them 15 minutes apart to make a little radar loop.
The images can be pulled from the BOM site via FTP/HTTP as PNG images. They need to be overlayed to construct the final full rafar image (basically map + radar + range guides + whatever). This can be done via urllib to pull and the PIL library to do the merging...doesn't look too crazy.
This will give me 4 finished PNG images I want to loop and display to the user.
My question is this - is the best way to somehow build a movie out of these 4 images to make a loop, or would it be better to trigger a slideshow or something? Basically, how do I get these 4 PNGs into something animated and on screen - either full screen or a window, doesn't matter for now.
This is the very first part of what I hope to make a quite comprehensive weather plugin eventually...but I just need a basic proof of concept to myself that I can get this going.
The first stage is a basic plugin to pull the rader image loops. Basically, this is a group of cycled images, say 4 of them 15 minutes apart to make a little radar loop.
The images can be pulled from the BOM site via FTP/HTTP as PNG images. They need to be overlayed to construct the final full rafar image (basically map + radar + range guides + whatever). This can be done via urllib to pull and the PIL library to do the merging...doesn't look too crazy.
This will give me 4 finished PNG images I want to loop and display to the user.
My question is this - is the best way to somehow build a movie out of these 4 images to make a loop, or would it be better to trigger a slideshow or something? Basically, how do I get these 4 PNGs into something animated and on screen - either full screen or a window, doesn't matter for now.
This is the very first part of what I hope to make a quite comprehensive weather plugin eventually...but I just need a basic proof of concept to myself that I can get this going.