Making UPnP shine for Gotham
#1
In theme with the "polishing our diamonds" endeavor, I'm wondering what minor tweaks we can make for the new and/or improved UPnP features.

Some that I think would be great if (and I stress "if") they wouldn't be an issue (in effort or stability) for Gotham:


UPnP "Play-to/with" - There are currently two ways to select another XBMC UPnP target to play a video over UPnP; The context menu and selecting "Play with", or using the action ID/keyboard command SwitchPlayer/Y.

It would be great if "play with" could also be added to the "select action" sub-menu, for those who have that enabled (XBMC -> Settings -> Videos -> File list -> Default select action).

For Touched/Re-touched, it would be awesome to have an actual button for "SwitchPlayer" on the video OSD. It would be similar to how Apple has a button for their AirPlay, more or less.


UPnP "Play-to/with" remote controls - When using the UPnP "Play to"/target feature, no full screen controls show up on Confluence. I'm not sure if it would help, but on Touched and Re-touched, they actually do show up, so if something could be taken from that, it would make using Confluence easier to remote play-to other UPnP targets. Otherwise, you are forced to use the mini player in the left-hand sidebar/blade menu.


Video info screen doesn't show up with UPnP shares - From what I understand, the only time the video info screen (with summary info, and the cast, refresh, etc buttons) is when a scraper is set to that video source. Since UPnP sources can't have a scraper set to them, the window won't show up when you press info (i). There is "info" there that is being shared from the other XBMC UPnP instance, so maybe some kind of "Fake" info screen could be used?


Thoughts about these ideas? Other ideas? UPnP target playback and UPnP library sharing are two very awesome features, even as they are right now. Anything to help them stand out more (discoverability) might also be something to consider in addition to usability.
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#2
All of these sound reasonable to me.
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#3
The "i" issue is wider. Its not possible to get it up on sources without content set, so IMO a fix for that could be to simply always allow it but populate it with what we know?

EDIT: Saw you wrote that Ned, nvm ;P
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#4
I guess the problem with the video info dialog is that there's no real logic to hide the "Refresh" button and "Choose art" button right now. So if you just allow it for anything there will be buttons visible with no (or maybe even wrong) logic behind it.
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#5
Is putting Play To on the video OSD an actual option? For some reason I'd always been under the impression that switching players midstream was more difficult or something. If it's an option, that's something we should do yesterday, as it brings us in line with both the Airplay method and the Chromecast method.
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#6
(2013-12-01, 18:51)natethomas Wrote: Is putting Play To on the video OSD an actual option? For some reason I'd always been under the impression that switching players midstream was more difficult or something. If it's an option, that's something we should do yesterday, as it brings us in line with both the Airplay method and the Chromecast method.

Yep. I even tried it by changing the OSD "Next" button to do "SwitchPlayer". It's really slick!
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#7
I think we'd need some form of info (for the skinner) what the players name is or that we are on non-local renderer. So that the skin could make the button look somewhat different when the stream is pushed elsewhere. Just from an interaction standpoint Smile

Otherwise I think it would be a really cool idea. And as said, it would line up quite well with other techs on the market.

Montellese, do we know on each fileitem if it has a content set? Or we have to ask its parent all the way to the source to know this? Because if we know at fileitem level I guess the hide should be rather simple?
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#8
(2013-12-02, 09:44)topfs2 Wrote: Montellese, do we know on each fileitem if it has a content set? Or we have to ask its parent all the way to the source to know this? Because if we know at fileitem level I guess the hide should be rather simple?

Not sure if we know the scraper but we can check if it's a UPnP item (and that it's not part of the videodb) which should be enough to disable the refresh button. Actually I think this is already done to some extent because I was working on the upnp importer this weekend and I imported some movies from another XBMC client and then opened the video info dialog on one of the imported items (which is in the videodb but still is a upnp item) and "Refresh" was disabled but "Choose art" was enabled (which is fine if you want to change the artwork for that item locally).
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#9
(2013-12-02, 10:06)Montellese Wrote: "Choose art" was enabled (which is fine if you want to change the artwork for that item locally).

i can already hear users saying "but it doesn't change the artwork on my server..."
but no if that would even be feasible but those are minor things of later concern when your is implemented and we start testing.
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#10
I'm btw all for moving "refresh" and "channge art" stuff to a "manage" button in the info window and open a popup/context menu for now. Makes no sense to clutter the UI with dozens of managing features you only use rarely. Could actually be the same "manage" context menu we already have.

On topic: if not possible already, skins should know when remote playing is active so that they can change the layout of the fullscreen playback page. Makes no sense to have a black screen in the controlling instance. Could even be a different window ID which might make more sense.
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#11
Heh, at a guess, any code that requires a new window ID would probably need to be submitted in the next 9 days, or else Jonathan and Trent could go crazy banana pants on our butts.
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#12
spinning the new window idea further, the playlist could be shown along with remote control featuers and maybe some shiny currently playing info (actors or artists info anyone?).
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#13
I was going to try and make a crude attempt at adding a UPnP Play-with button for the ReTouched OSD, and I thought of something.

Would it be possible to hide this button if "Look for remote UPnP players" is off? (Settings -> Services -> UPnP)
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#14
4 days until feature freeze.
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#15
Well this would be a skin addition only (hopefully) so isn't that decoupled? I mean isn't confluence in the skin repo?
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"Well Im gonna download the code and look at it a bit but I'm certainly not a really good C/C++ programer but I'd help as much as I can, I mostly write in C#."
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