New features added in the dev branch

[erwan10]

Hello,

Here is a review of what has just been added in the dev branch regarding skins2 :

- fullscreen controller:

- it can now also be activated by mouse move
- transparency and fading out are supported when the Window Manager supports it.
- qt-opacity and qt-fs-opacity parameters are now recognized by skins2

- Relative placement

Up to now, all x, y, width or height could only be given in pixels, and it was impossible to take the size of the screen into account for placement.

The skin dtd has been enhanced in the following way :

- x, y, width and height will now be given either in pixels (default) or in percentage of their container. For a window/layout, the container will be the entire screen (whatever its size). For other widgets, it will be their upper container (layout or panel).

- In addition, five new tags are added to 'geographically' place a window or a widget within its container :
position : takes the value of "Center", "North", "NorthWest", ... to refer to a specific area of a container (divided into 9 subareas)
x-margin/y-margin: allow for an horizontal/vertical margin with respect to the borders of the container
x-offset/y-offset: additional parameters to offset the window/widget from the position computed from the (position, x-margin, y-margin) parameters.

Both x-margin, y-margin, x-offset, y-offset are also given either in pixels or % of their upper container.

- The image control can now accept an width and a height parameters to ease placement.

Default skin

I updated the default skin to showcase how these new features can be used :

- the main window is now centered in the screen (whatever the screen resolution)
- the playlist window is also centered with a 5% offset to avoid covering the main window
- all ancillary windows are all centered
- the fullscreen controller is centered at the bottom of the screen with vertical margin worth 3% of the height of the screen


These new features have been tested extensively on Linux (both with and without composite window managers), a bit on WinNT (though there is currently a bug that prevents fullscreen to be fully usable). Volunteers are welcome to test it on Vista and Win7.

For Vista/Win7, the refresh artefacts when moving the fullscreen controller should also be fixed (please, test and report ...)

Erwan10

[3breadt]

Great for VLC, not so great for me, much stuff to implement in the skin editor and no time

[erwan10]

Well, vlc1.2 is not yet out .... that gives time, I guess !

And the fullscreen controller transparency/fading-out is actually not so promising at least on WinXP :
- fully functional with --vout wingdi (but who really uses it ?)
- works weirdly with --vout directx
- works wildly with --vout opengl

So, if tests on Vista/Win7 are in the same vein, I'm afraid that only Linux will benefit from it !

[Manisha]

Somehow i cannot get the x,y co-ordinate working with VLC.

I am bringing up two VLC instance :
"vlc.exe -I skins2 --width=60 --height=60 --video-x=10 --video-y=10 video.wmv"

"vlc.exe -I skins2 --width=60 --height=600 --video-x=10 --video-y=60 video.wmv"


Above command doesn't place the VLC instance on top of each other. The height and width arguments works fine though.

Please let me know how can i bring up two instance of VLC such that they are not place on top of each other.

Thanks,
Manisha

[Spyme]

Will try to take care of the improvements on Advantage.VLC and test it under Win7.

[Spyme]

Uhm, sorry then. Hate the nightly repository -.-

[erwan10]

As dev branch, I meant the next major not-yet-released version (aka vlc1.2.0). You can already test it on windows (latest build as of today is in http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/win ... 0127-0003/)

[Spyme]

Updated mine to the new features. Fullscreen controller works very well, no more artifacts on moving. Transparency and movement are smooth too.
Tested on Win7 x64 with 1.2.

Well done, erwan.

Btw: vlc.faster() and vlc.slower() broken? Can´t bring em to work, regardless of the version.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Yep!

[erwan10]

Updated mine to the new features. Fullscreen controller works very well, no more artifacts on moving. Transparency and movement are smooth too.
Tested on Win7 x64 with 1.2.

nice to hear it works

Btw: vlc.faster() and vlc.slower() broken? Can´t bring em to work, regardless of the version.

Thanks for reporting. It will be fixed by tomorrow.

[Spyme]

Forgot something yesterday: All new Att-values, must have her first character uppercased or they don´t work. Work as intended?

Example: <window id="foo" position="north"></window> isn´t recognized but <window id="foo" position="North"></window> is.

[erwan10]

You're right. That needs a correction too, at least for the sake of consistency. Probably having both work is more desirable.

[Spyme]

Is there any chance that you will take a look on how skins2 handles large png´s? Atm i decided to remove the timeline based filling of bars because it forces heavy cpu load. Depending of the bar size and desired look, there can be huge files like 500px x 8500px, which forces the cpu load to around 50%. Maybe there is a chance to add another more simple method like start img, fill pixel, end img.

[kylkorver]

cool love the new feature...

[edcoppen]

Any idea when the fullscreen controller auto-fade will be incorporated into the Skins editor?

[3breadt]

I've stopped work on the skin designer, I don't have the time to maintain it anymore. And so far nobody else was interested in helping the development.

[edcoppen]

That's a shame but I understand. Thank you for all you have done!

[AndyM48]

Can someone tell me where/how to get hold of the development version?

[Lotesdelere]

Can someone tell me where/how to get hold of the development version?

https://nightlies.videolan.org