Web sites to publish vlc skins

[AsMaX]

Hi all,
if you are reading this topic you must know about the skin capabilities of vlc, and how wonderful they are
However very few people have sent us skins to publish on http://www.videolan.org, maybe because it is not so easy to submit a skin, the documentation is not clear enough (??) or I don't know what...
So to promote a little more the thing, I thought about adding vlc skins on popular skins / wallpapers sites, as most known players (at least winamp and WMP) do. If people know good sites we could "invade", please give your opinion ! Of course any help is also welcome to improve the skins download page on videolan.org

[Asim]

hmm... perhaps the skins should be sorted by "popularity" or "most downloaded" or something of that sort? also... perhaps the method of submitting skins should be done via a php-based form?

just my opinion

- Asim

[AsMaX]

Well with 10 skins on the site there is nothing to sort at the moment
BTW I've just started a support of winamp2 skins in vlc (there is already something quite usable in the svn version), which will potentially give us thousands of skins

[mdi]

i think the first thing to do is solve the "transparency-problem". i stopped creating skins a long time ago because there´s still no way to have real rounded shapes without black pixels. so it´s not worth it.

in the newest nightly built versions (since november) everything got worse relating to that. i don´t think you´ll get "thousands of skins" without solving this problem.

[AsMaX]

Well which OS are you using ?? I never heard of such a problem, and nothing has been changed in this part of the code for a long time... Of course if transparency doesn't work for you it has to be fixed but this is supposed to work for (at least nearly) everybody !
As for winamp2 skins, they don't use rounded corners anyway

[mdi]

i use windows xp.

never heard of it? take a closer look at the "WB Kids" screenshot on the "download skins" page for example. how would that one look on a brighter background? or if it´s "always on top"?

well, something must have changed in the code last month. i don´t know anything about coding and i would never criticise the brilliant work of any developer. all i can see is that libskins2_plugin.dll is now ~300kb bigger than before and that there are some changes in skin.dtd ... ... i´m just a stupid graphic designer ...

just to see what i mean ... here´s my very minimalistic skin (it´s more than enough for me, because i use vlc for watching tv most of the time. so i don´t need any advanced features and use the default video window with captures. on top is my windows taskbar). the first picture is development version october 14, the second one is november 17. same skin, the background-file is png.

[AsMaX]

Well the WB kids skin heavily uses transparency and I don't see any problem with the screenshot; do you have any transparency problem with this skin ? (you should not!)
How do you set transparency in your skin ? do you use an alpha channel directly in the PNG image or the "alphacolor" attribute in your xml ? I am asking because I found recently a bug in transparency handling in PNG bitmaps, so I would expect it has been *fixed* in the most recent version and not broken ! As for the "on-top" problem, it could be a problem specific to windows as I don't see it on linux...
Maybe you can give us a link to your skin so that we can check and fix the bug if any.

[Guest]

Hi all,
if you are reading this topic you must know about the skin capabilities of vlc, and how wonderful they are
However very few people have sent us skins to publish on http://www.videolan.org, maybe because it is not so easy to submit a skin, the documentation is not clear enough (??) or I don't know what...

You're right, the documentation is not clear enough. So how do we submit skins?

Anyhow if you feel like uploading one - here's one I made: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/26008097/

So to promote a little more the thing, I thought about adding vlc skins on popular skins / wallpapers sites, as most known players (at least winamp and WMP) do. If people know good sites we could "invade", please give your opinion ! Of course any help is also welcome to improve the skins download page on videolan.org

How about providing an 'upload' link?[/b]

[Guest]

Well which OS are you using ?? I never heard of such a problem, and nothing has been changed in this part of the code for a long time... Of course if transparency doesn't work for you it has to be fixed but this is supposed to work for (at least nearly) everybody !
As for winamp2 skins, they don't use rounded corners anyway

The 'transparency problem' that I saw was that you don't really use the alpha channel of a PNG file: If part of an image is totally transparent, then all is well, however if part of an image has a partially transparent area - such as you would get with an anti-aliased edge - then that pixel is just rendered as black. In other words you don't appear to do any actual alpha-blending of the source image with the destination image. This makes using PNGs a bit pointless - you're effectively wasting 1 whole byte of data per pixel - you might as well stick with 'magic-pink'.

[judge2005]

Err. That 'Guest' in the two posts above is me! I thought I was logged in.

[zorglub]

Hello,

It seems your skin throws some XML parsing errors

Code: Select all

00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 95) : Element Layout conten t does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Group [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 102) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Group [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 112) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Group [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Slider [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Text [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Text [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Anchor [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 149) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 149) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Image [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 149) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Text [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 149) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Group [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 134) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Button [00000277] xml private error: XML parser error (line 170) : Element Layout conte nt does not follow the DTD, Misplaced Playlist [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL [00000271] skins2 interface error: unknown bitmap id: Prev_n [00000271] skins2 interface error: unknown bitmap id: Next_n [00000271] skins2 interface error: unknown bitmap id: PLbuttonBG [00000271] skins2 interface error: Unknown font id: Title_font [00000271] skins2 interface error: Unknown font id: PLtitle [00000271] skins2 interface error: Unknown font id: PLnormal

[ipkiss]

And the playlist slider is in the wrong orientation...

But apart from that, it is a nice skin! We could put it on the website once you have fixed these little problems, if you agree.

[judge2005]

Try that. I fixed the scrollbar. I think the 'parse' errors were actually because I hadn't packaged the skin up right. It should be fine now. BTW windows users are going to find it hard to produce a .tar.gz file. WinZip certainly doesn't do it - I had to go search out some GNU binaries

Anyhow let me know if this fixes all the problems.

[ipkiss]

The parse errors are there because your XML is wrong, it doesn't come from a packaging issue. They are still there...

[judge2005]

The parse errors are there because your XML is wrong, it doesn't come from a packaging issue. They are still there...

Well I took a look at the DTD in the skin folder and it looks to me like I can have a Group element in a Layout element so I'm not sure exactly what the error is that you're seeing. I tried turning on logging using the preferences dialog but I don't see a log file either. So any help you can give would useful.

Thanks.

[AsMaX]

BTW windows users are going to find it hard to produce a .tar.gz file. WinZip certainly doesn't do it -

zip files are now supported too (initially to be able to load winamp2 skins), but only in vlc 0.8.5 (i.e nightly builds)

[ipkiss]

Well I took a look at the DTD in the skin folder and it looks to me like I can have a Group element in a Layout element so I'm not sure exactly what the error is that you're seeing.

Yes, you can have one Group element, but only one under a Layout element.
Group elements can be nested, so if you want you can do the following:

Code: Select all

<Layout> <Group> <Group> ... </Group> <Group> ... </Group> </Group> </Layout>

To see the errors, you can right-click on the skin, and select "Misc-->Messages". Another way is to run 'vlc -v --extraintf logger" which opens a window with the messages (it also saves them in a file called vlc-log.txt).

[AsMaX]

judge2005: nice skin indeed just some comments:
- the file playlist_button_bg.png is missing (there is an error in the logs)
- the image playlistn.png has transparent pixels inside; you should not do that as it leads to annoying bugs when you want to close the playlist (as soon as you click on the button, the control loses the focus and this must not happen)

Concerning the transparency issue, it is not a bug but a feature In fact alpha blending can be supported everywhere in the skins engine but I decided to activate it only to render texts (as it is *really* needed in this case) and not on Image controls for instance, as it is very CPU consuming to do real time alpha blending (at least on linux), when you resize a window for instance. Besides, maybe I am wrong but I think you can always precalculate the blending in your bitmaps; anyway if you *really* need real-time alpha blending I could add an option to do that.

[judge2005]

Thanks guys. I will fix the issues you've seen.

As regards alpha-blending: The only reason I wanted it in this skin was to address precisely the issue you describe with transparent areas inside a control - I would make the image with an alpha of, say, 1 (as opposed to 255) for the 'transparent' areaas. This is generally not visible to the human eye but it also generally returns a positive hit test for the image for those apps that use it. You could do the same thing by just adding an explicit 'hit-test' image that is not actually displayed as part of the control - as I recall Mac OSX takes this approach.

Otherwise I guess its just plain easier for a skinner to produce anti-aliased controls and not have to worry about where on a background the images are going to be placed.

Anyway - for me its not a biggie, it just seems a little odd using PNGs and then essentially not using the alpha channel. In fact here's a thought - perhaps perform alpha-blending depending on the format of the source image. i.e. if the source image has an alpha-channel then alpha-blend it. Otherwise don't? Though I appreciate your point about performance.

[AsMaX]

Indeed I thought of implementing this auto-detection of semi-transparency to activate or not alpha blending, maybe I'll do that if I don't know what to do

[judge2005]

OK, I updated the file, can you download it and check it again? I opened the message window like you said but I didn't see any XML errors at all in it (with the old version of the skin), so I'm just guessing that I've fixed them.

[ipkiss]

To see the errors, you can right-click on the skin, and select "Misc-->Messages". Another way is to run 'vlc -v --extraintf logger" which opens a window with the messages (it also saves them in a file called vlc-log.txt).

Did you try the "other way" to have messages? For me, it still gives:

[00000277] skins2 interface warning: FileBitmap::getData() returns NULL
[00000277] skins2 interface error: unknown bitmap id: PLbuttonBG

And if you use '-vv' instead of '-v' in the command above, you even have the reason:

[00000277] main interface debug: could not open file E:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\vlt38\InspiratSE\playlist_button_bg.png for reading

[judge2005]

Yes. I tried the other way too, but that showed even less data. Anyway. Yet another try at clearing this up is up on deviantart. Pretty annoyed I missed that one

[mdi]

sorry AsMaX... i didn´t have the time to post in the last weeks.

but judge2005 described the same problem with alpha-blending, better than i was able to do in english...

[DonBilbo]

Hello friends. I've got a general question. Finally I have finished my skin and I wrote a email with the skin to vlc@videolan.org on 6th August 2006. But I'm still waiting for replay. I don't know wheather they are too busy or they didn't get my email or . . . So yesterday I wrote a new one.

It would be great if you nice developers could read the email and post the new skin into the videolan.org homepage. (Please, could you write Mesut Alptekin as the author for the skin instead of my User-Name: DonBilbo).

Thanks a lot.
DonBilbo