The Return of the Green Button

[unisoft 291]

4 hours ago, softworkz said:

Intention - yes. There also exists internal consensus for making it available to selected client apps/devices.

The keyword being "selected", though. The regular themes are adaptable and able to work well even on rather low-profile clients - for example by disabling visual effects, animations, transparency and gradients. The WMC theme in contrast, strongly relies on all these things and makes intensive use of bitmaps with alpha-blending and newer CSS features. Illustrating that by example is one of the reasons why I have given some insights into the anatomy of the toggle control in the post above.

Getting this to work on all clients/devices is a lengthy process with continuous work, reacting to user feedback and making changes accordingly - something that @Luke has painfully gone through for the core themes over the years. You might be able to imagine his reaction when I had told that the theme would be using around 280 bitmaps (for comparison, bitmap count used by core themes: 1).

Thanks @Luke for still not turning it down!

But what's clear is that the burden for maintaining this across all apps and devices cannot be put upon him, neither do I have much interest in working on degrading the experience to make it work on less capable devices. Either it works and looks in the way it's supposed to do or it's not the kind of theme it's meant to be.

When a client device isn't capable to handle the theme smoothly, it won't be available for those.

Candidates on the "very likely" side are apps running on desktop PCs with decent hardware or Android devices with powerful CPU and graphics. Rather unlikely are non-recent smart TVs or low-power/low-mem SBCs and sticks. For everything in between, it's yet to be determined.
There's also a "No" side, which includes clients that are using different UI frameworks like the Android TV app or Roku.

As you can see, while the question is simple, the answer is less, as I do not want to create any false expectations. 

The above is all I know for know.

Luke could simply put back the BLUE theme/background  he took out for the LG App if you don't do for all clients.

I can understand Apple TV, legacy Android TV APP and ROKU not getting them, as they have their own UI design and Apple unlikely to agree to a Microsoft based Theme. I'd like the Android Client (universal app) and LG App (if possible) to have them though. My TV is a 2016 OLED 3D model but has a decent processor in it but LG LCD 2017 and 2021 models don't.

[softworkz 3349]

6 minutes ago, unisoft said:

I'd like the Android Client (universal app) and LG App (if possible) to have them though. My TV is a 2016 OLED 3D model but has a decent processor

It also depends on the graphics and the supported html/css features.

[softworkz 3349]

WMC Theme - Movie Library Browsing

Time for something new...:

[lightsout 144]

I like it, kept waiting for you to open a movie.

[softworkz 3349]

3 hours ago, lightsout said:

I like it, kept waiting for you to open a movie.

By now I have almost all of the important building blocks covered - except one: The single-item view (and all its variations)...

[softworkz 3349]

This time, I was able to finalize the guide/EPG view:

 

I will post a video tomorrow.

[Junglejim 359]

31 minutes ago, softworkz said:

This time, I was able to finalize the guide/EPG view:

 

I will post a video tomorrow.

Wow, this take me back.. This is going to be awesome!!

[softworkz 3349]

The visual appearance is nice, I had done the visuals in summer last year already, but that's just one part of the story.

EPG guides have always been a special interest of mine. Whenever I have come across a new TV at friends or in stores in the past decade, the first thing I did was to open the guide and start navigating around. To date, I haven't seen an implementation that was getting even close to WMC's guide in terms of how how fluently and quickly and easily you can navigate around.

Same applies to the current guide in Emby and I always had the vague idea to come up with a custom guide implementation that works as good as WMC's one. Recently, when I had taken a closer look at our Emby guide (the htmljs one, found in many but not all apps), I realized that the underlying technical basis is quite good - it's just that work had ended without addressing all the countless quirks that still exist.

There are roughly two categories of issues:

• Visual Rendering
  and
• Navigation Behavior

 

In a first round, I have addressed most of the visual issues. 
Some of them can only be seen when the EPG data is not quite clean and some are only visible when transparency is used (like the WMC theme does), but most are common.
Here's a comparison:

[softworkz 3349]

An excerpt from the improvement:

• Stops showing overlapping program blocks where some are partially out of the view region
• Reliably hide blocks which are outside of the view region (both left and right side)
• Fixes calculation of item indents. The left edge of the program blocks is rock solid constant now
• Make sure to indent all blocks. Sometimes the left arrows weren't shown and the caption was moving out of the view
• Show text truncation with ellipsis ("..."). Previously, the caption text of blocks was just hard cut off at the right edge.
• Snapping: When a block at the left or right edge would be too small to be shown in a useful way, it's hidden and other blocks are adjusted to fill the space
• Fixed Right Edge. Previously, the guide grid just went to the edge of the screen where it was cut off visually

[arrbee99 1562]

Those changes tidy things up a lot.

But.

The thing I notice most from the guide is the amount of space it wastes. I mean a whole screen and 5 and a bit lines of channels.

[softworkz 3349]

25 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

The thing I notice most from the guide is the amount of space it wastes. I mean a whole screen and 5 and a bit lines of channels.

The rows should still be large enough to show text in a readable size and with too many rows, your ability to have a good overview gets degraded again, but 5 rows is a bit too few, I agree.

The WMC theme shows 7 channel rows (like WMC original). It has a smaller preview section and no tab bar at the top. I think the tab bar is moot, because after you have scrolled down somewhere in the EPG grid to a place of interest, you don't want to scroll back to the top of the EPG grid in order to reach the tab bar (after another UP tap) for switching to another section. Unless you want to go forward (showing details of an entry and performing any action), it's makes much more sense to exit the guide with going BACK (single tap). 

[arrbee99 1562]

Yep, the 10 foot (3.048m) interface. Ebr's compact guide view also has 7 rows from what I remember, makes a lot of difference. Make the preview at the top narrower and it could be 8.

Personally, I liked the guide the BBC used to have (think it was them, but maybe not) - there was no preview at the top when you were on a channel (the left hand column) and when you moved right to a program it moved the channels below that down to show the preview.

Not a WMC thing I suppose but if you ever feel the urge...

[softworkz 3349]

10 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Make the preview at the top narrower and it could be 8.

Yes, 8 is the maximum that WMC could be tweaked to with preview (and 11 without).

12 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Personally, I liked the guide the BBC used to have (think it was them, but maybe not) - there was no preview at the top when you were on a channel (the left hand column) and when you moved right to a program it moved the channels below that down to show the preview.

Not a WMC thing I suppose but if you ever feel the urge...

Not at this time. Accurate representation is the primary goal now. The remaining important points that I see are all about navigation:

• Navigating up or down must not cause any horizontal scroll position change
• When navigating (left or right) to a partially visible block at the right or left edge, the block should be  focused without that the item is fully scrolled into view.
  Only a subsequent nav in that direction should cause horizontal scrolling
• In the following cases  the navigation action (user input) should not change item focus (to the next item in that direction) but instead advance the guide grid by a fixed interval:
  • When no item is available to be focused in horizontal direction
  • When there is a gap which would cause a jump
  • When the item itself is too wide and would cause a too large movement
  • when the focus is in a row without data:
• When an up or down action is performed for the first time (after different actions have been carried out), the navigation needs to memorize the horizontal extent of the currently focused item. As long as the same action is repeated (a pure sequence of UPs or a pure sequence of DOWNs), the navigation must focus the item in the next row that is best matching the horizontal extent that was memorized - it must not be influenced by items in other rows that might have been focused meanwhile
  In other words: the horizontal position needs to be retained while going up or down
  Simple example:
  • An item is focused which is horizontally roughly in the center
  • You move up to an empty row (no data) => whole row space gets focused
  • You move up again to a row with an item spanning from 0% to 80% => that item gets focused
  • You move up again to a row with several small items => the item gets focused which most closely matches the horizontal position of the item in the initial row from where you started moving upwards

[arrbee99 1562]

Is all this stuff (that would never occur to me) just for your WMC version, or does it make its way into Emby in general ?

[softworkz 3349]

On 1/30/2023 at 1:36 AM, arrbee99 said:

Is all this stuff (that would never occur to me) just for your WMC version, or does it make its way into Emby in general ?

The functional changes are made for general integration into Emby clients. It depends on whatever @Luke will decide to pick up. What remains will be specific to the theme.

[softworkz 3349]

On 1/30/2023 at 1:26 AM, softworkz said:

• Navigating up or down must not cause any horizontal scroll position change
• When navigating (left or right) to a partially visible block at the right or left edge, the block should be  focused without that the item is fully scrolled into view.
  Only a subsequent nav in that direction should cause horizontal scrolling
• In the following cases  the navigation action (user input) should not change item focus (to the next item in that direction) but instead advance the guide grid by a fixed interval:
  • When no item is available to be focused in horizontal direction
  • When there is a gap which would cause a jump
  • When the item itself is too wide and would cause a too large movement
  • when the focus is in a row without data:
• When an up or down action is performed for the first time (after different actions have been carried out), the navigation needs to memorize the horizontal extent of the currently focused item. As long as the same action is repeated (a pure sequence of UPs or a pure sequence of DOWNs), the navigation must focus the item in the next row that is best matching the horizontal extent that was memorized - it must not be influenced by items in other rows that might have been focused meanwhile
  In other words: the horizontal position needs to be retained while going up or down
  Simple example:
  • An item is focused which is horizontally roughly in the center
  • You move up to an empty row (no data) => whole row space gets focused
  • You move up again to a row with an item spanning from 0% to 80% => that item gets focused
  • You move up again to a row with several small items => the item gets focused which most closely matches the horizontal position of the item in the initial row from where you started moving upwards

This has gone much faster than expected. All of the above fixed:

[softworkz 3349]

Fast, Fluid and Precise - how much did I miss that...

Turn on the sound!

 

[arrbee99 1562]

Its certainly nice to see pop-ups that don't cover the whole screen, unlike another new app I could mention.

Its certainty nice to see 7 whole rows of guide (never mind previous comments...) instead of 5 or 6 and a half, like anther new app I could mention.

[Spaceboy 2505]

1 hour ago, arrbee99 said:

Its certainly nice to see pop-ups that don't cover the whole screen, unlike another new app I could mention.

Its certainty nice to see 7 whole rows of guide (never mind previous comments...) instead of 5 or 6 and a half, like anther new app I could mention.

pretty sure i had 12 in wmc. i don't remember the name of the hack...

[arrbee99 1562]

The more the merrier...

Also, will this get different colours ? didn't WMC have different colours. I quite fancy green and grey (no not at the same time...)

[softworkz 3349]

25 minutes ago, Spaceboy said:

pretty sure i had 12 in wmc. i don't remember the name of the hack...

You had 11. That's the maximum with the preview disabled. (8 is max with preview).

[softworkz 3349]

35 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

The more the merrier...

Also, will this get different colours ? didn't WMC have different colours. I quite fancy green and grey (no not at the same time...)

Yes, but it depends on the EPG data. I have  done a different setup to test this (with "Emby Guide Data"). Well, at least I get one color:

[softworkz 3349]

Here's an interesting comparison. This is original WMC with the same channels setup and the same EPG source:

 

 

Emby doesn't properly import the program details, that's why it shows just one or two colors - opposed to WMC which is fed with Schedules Direct data (same source as "Emby Guide data").
(TVnext does it right of course for GN/Emby guide data and allows detailed custom mapping for other guide sources like xmlttv)

[arrbee99 1562]

TVNext and this should be a very nice combo.

Must apologise though, was asking more about overall colour scheme and maybe backdrops, for a bit of variety, like these Google found for me -

 

[softworkz 3349]

The first one (green) is a well-known patch which replaces all resources. This wouldn't be too difficult - but seriously...GREEN?

The second of your images is a mock-up. It's not a patched WMC with a different background - it's just photoshopped. The fonts are wrong for instance.

Edited February 1, 2023 by softworkz