Kaleidescape skin & GUI replica/clone (some skinning engine enhancements needed too?)
#16
any one know how to remove the left menu? :nuts:
TV Mosaic on Windows 10 as PVR Backend |  1 RaspberryPI 3 Client (LibreElec) | Amazon FireTV box | 5 Amazon FireTV sticks | FireTV Cube | 2 Nvidia Shield TV
Tuners: HD HomeRun 4 ATSC (OTA) | IPTV
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#17
Lightbulb 
With all the new skinning-engine functions going into SVN I thought it be good timing to bump this suggestion on futher enhancing XBMC's skinning-engine so that full skin clone/replica of the Kaleidescape interface could be made. I hope that developers think this would be a nice feature and that one or more skinners/graphic-artist to volunteer help make it happen.

To re-cap, Kaleidescape (www.kaleidescape.com) is a very expensive and very slick movie and music-player / high-end entertainment-system (with a seperate server / storage-unit). The movie-player is the front-end and has a very fluent and intuitive user-interface (which in this request is the 'only' part we would want to replicate in XBMC GUI). For reference; the server back-end contains a DVD-library and catalog database orginizer, (which XBMC's video database can already do together with DVD ISO/IMG image parsing and the IMDb scraper). So what a developer would need to enhance is the XBMC's skinning-engine so that is will be able to display video-covers and music-album thumbnails tightly together and at the same time display only part of the movie/album information (ie. the title and just the beginning of the plot-description) in the same window, without displaying any other contols or buttons. Guess the hard part will be to do this so that everything moves very fluently when browsing up, down and right to left, left to right. Maybe also add in an additional option to smoothly zoom in and out beween small and big icons with just one button press, like in picture-view in MAC OS X and Microaoft Windows Vista, (so it will smoothly zoom when go from displaying 12 small-size video-cover icons to just 6 big-size video-cover icons)? Plus also make XBMC GUI be able 'list' and 'details' view in similar Kaleidescape style, (the 'list' part being almost like that in SVN with XBMC being able to display the icons in list-view, only difference is the option to only display half-screen-size cover/album icon of the high-lighted item in list-view). Now the Kaleidescape has one additional feature and that is the shuffle, were all covers/album icons shuffle around in front of your eyes, but to be honest that feature looks just to be pointless eye candy and probebly takes more resources that the Xbox CPU/GPU/memory has to offer so unless I'm totally wrong about that just skip that bit.

Learn More:
* Kaleidescape Experience Video
* Kaleidescape Brochure
* Experiencing Kaleidescape

Any volunteer(s) out there that are up to the task? Huh
At least one developer and one skinner/graphic-artist is needed for project like this to even make it of the ground. Rolleyes

PS! My 2 cents suggestion for a skin-names that would fully use such skinning enhancements to clone Kaleidescape: "Kaleidoscope", "Teleidoscope" or "Kaleidoplex", as on can assume that Kaleidescape, Inc. came up with the idea of their name based on Kaleidoscope tube, (Kaleidoscope tube which is a "toy containing small, brightly-colored tumbling objects, and a set of mirrors which reflect the view of the tumbling objects into repeating, symmetric patterns", see full description of Kaleidoscope tube on wikipedia.org).
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#18
Smile 
"A crew member can easily replace a failed disk, without you ever knowing there was a problem."
There is no way that their interface isn't going to get owned now. If for no other reason then shear principle.

I'll start it when I get home.

My $99 Xbox is just as good as your $27,000 Kaleidescape.
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#19
Ok, I know it sucks, but I only was able to work on it for about 30 min.
This is one of the menus they use, the multi-thumbnail one, sorts thumbnails by relation to others, so it may take awhile.
I'm going to bed, I'll work on it some more when I get time, also to help out, how the hell do you remove the size,date and page info from a listcontrol item, I can hide them with overlays and such, but it would be so much nicer to simply not display them.

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#20
Check out the new list/panel controls used in PM3/Clearity etc. Way more flexible than listcontrol, which is what it looks like you're using.

There's no docs written as yet, but by looking in CommonControlTypes.xml in PM3 for instance, you should be able to get a reasonable idea.

Cheers,
Jonathan
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


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#21
Thanks jmarshall, that works so much better. I just wish it didn't take me so long to figure out to use it. Here what I got so far. It's a little better, I still got 4 hours to work on it here, so it may get a little further.


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#22
I'm going to sleep, don't know when I'll get to work on it again.
Everything on the screenshot is legit, except the "PG-13" I can't seem to get the
Code:
<info>ListItem.Genre</info>
to work right, for that matter none of the ListItem or the other
Code:
$INFO[]
in a
Code:
<label>
. also I can't seem to put the radiobutton light anywhere, it just goes a few pixels from the right of your png no matter what. The menus at the bottom do work, but the radiobutton issue limits the tabs.
Thanks again for the help, if anyone wants the source, just say so, that way you don't have to work out all the numbers for 4x3. It's just a couple hacks to PM3s files, 4 of them.


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#23
could u mirror the look of the apple movie trailers script? as far as a description of what the movie is about at the bottom of the list and coverart?
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#24
Smile 
I was ripping off the interface to Kaliedscape, a media center for ultra rich people.
If I wasn't constrained by their designs, I could do more things to it.
I wasn't really trying to make a skin, I just want to see how hard their interface was to port to XBMC. I will prolly work on it some more, and make the other interfaces they use if I can find the time. I started doing it out of spite because of it's price, and how normal people could never afford this kind of thing (plus if you think about it, the way their little server works, it violates the DMCA) and how us normal people can't buy a push-button DVD archiver.
If you want anything, I'll post it, but be warned ALL other menus of this skin are completely F'ed up right now do to me canabalizing PM3 xml files and being too lazy to ADD things rather then butcher current ones.

If anyone knows how to move the radiobutton light, or why the database info won't populate, please let me know.
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#25
Question 
I had a few hours so I made some progress.
I still need to know about moving the radiobutton and button text.
Also why I can't seem to pull up any database info related to the file in focus (genre,rating,tagline)
Heres what I have so far, they are all functional, and I tried to make them as close to the real system as possible, I am still working on the third one, but can't make any progress without the database info.

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Image

Image
Huh
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#26
Big Grin 
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Image

Sorry I linked the wrong images.Blush
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#27
I can't believe this project has stalled. I'd like to bump it just in case there has been more progress made.
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#28
I second Dyltone's bumping.
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#29
I am currenly working on an XMB (PS3) skin, and it is moving along fast, if I get the time, it should be done in a month or less, I have someone (blaize) working on it with me, so it is moving along fast.

As soon as it is done, I have been planning to finish the Kaleidescape clone, I started it on a whim and XBMC's skinning engine wasn't really diverse enough to cover all the elements of Kaleidescape (and neither were my coding skills), but now that's changed, I believe most of it can be ported over to XBMC now, and fully intend to finish it.

I will try to enlist the help of people like blaize and mikeb, since I have no talent when it comes to graphics, if they help out with the simple graphics this system uses, it should be easy to finish.

Basically when XMBox is done, you'll know I've started Kaleidescrape again.
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#30
Whats the status of this? Have you given up on it?

Mpegman Wrote:xbmc developers,

i know this idea has been somewhat discussed already. but i thought i'd add a spin to it.

would it be that hard to made xbmc have all of the features of the high-end (and very expensive) kaleidescape server? http://www.kaleidescape.com/

if you're not familiar with this server, check it out!

so basically, here's what i'm suggesting:
*1. build in a "ripping" function for dvd movies. the ripper should be a simple, user-friendly feature. it should allow you to rip by chapter, file, or whole move (with or without special features). also, if the user selected "whole movie", they should be able to select whether to make the decrypted files into one vob file, or keep it split up.
*2. the resulting file(s) should be placed either on an smb share, or on the local drive.
*3. it would be great to have the imdb info for each movie/clip. thumbnail, title, director, actors, etc.

please let me know if you guys are interested in this feature. if you either can't or don't want to implement this feature, is it possible for me to write a module to implement this feature for xbmc myself (i have the xdk)? i have several friends who would be willing to help program this as well.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

mpegman
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