Andreas Brugger wrote:
The only way a plugin might "blend in" usefully would be to open a cSkinDisplayMenu and draw some stuff into the "central area" of that menu. That way the "decorations" (like title, buttons etc) would be drawn in the skin specific way, while the actual content is up to the plugin to draw.
I do plan to implement this possibility, but right now I'm still at the (audio) track stuff...
Klaus
This would improve the overall design of VDR and its plugins, but the "central area" would still have a different design. I know that this would be a huge piece of work, but wouldn't it be better to alter the skins, that they would define a general design of the menus, but also the design of standard objects (like title, button, text, highlighted text, progress bar ...). So a plugin could take this standard-objects and assemble the screen. I don't know how KDE or GNOME handels skins, but it should be anything similar to this.
What do you think? Something for vdr-1.6 or vdr-8.0? :-)
Well, I guess this is one of the times where I need to say: KISS!
Let's keep things simple! A skin can display the menus and stuff in whatever way it likes. A plugin can't even begin to imagine what exactly a skin looks like. That's why there is only a very basic interface to a thing like cSkinDisplayMenu, which can have several features like a title, buttons, items etc. After all this is not a desktop - it's an appliance!
There's nothing wrong with a plugin taking the whole OSD and displaying on it whatever it wants - if it thinks the standard cSkin* objects aren't suitable for what it has to display, then it doesn't fit into the overal VDR scheme, anyway ;-)
Bye, Andreas Brugger
P.S.: My best wishes for the 5th vdr-anniversary. Although I'm only "witness" of the last two years there were huge improvements and the software was always ahead of the other products. I hope there is much to come (HDTV maybe) so the VDR-hobby shall never die. :-)
Thanks.
Though I'm not sure whether we should really be looking forward to HDTV. After all, the providers will come up will all kinds of new restrictions and probably may make digital recording completely obsolete... :-(
Klaus