Well, it's open source.

It's a rather simple matter of changing the background in the MCML code to black, removing the animation, and recompiling.... you can even use the free Visual Studio Express C# and the Media Centre SDK.

That's the great thing about open source software. If you don't like something you can personalise it for your tastes.

Musictype:

PLUCKYHD:

I love this app but I must say it has taken a spin in the wrong direction. I loved the simplicity of the old black background and layout when selecting the movie. The new one is too busy in my personal opinion.

I hate to say this, but I agree. I really wanted to like this, and hoped that VMC will finally have a great video plugin. I just tried 1.1.12.0, took one look at it, and then gave up. With all due respect to Sam and his efforts: The UI of the latest versions is just all over the place, busy, random and getting more and more amateurish, from a design perspective. Too bad, it had good potential.

hmm i dont really see where you guys are coming from to be honest, ive been using the latest alpha releases, and yes there were a couple of UI issues with spacing etc but they are being worked out, in what way do you think it looks more "busy"? to me it actually looks simpler and cleaner now than the previous build (1.1.5.0) and i dont see any random parts to the UI, i suppose its all to do with personal taste, but the latest alpha looks pretty clean and easy to use and seems to be stable too for me, maybe some examples of "random" and "busy" sections of video browser may help sam?.

just my thoughts, hope nobody takes offense.

paul.

paulaeccleston:

... maybe some examples of "random" and "busy" sections of video browser may help sam?.

just my thoughts, hope nobody takes offense....

No offense taken, and none meant.

"Random" as in elements somewhat arbitrary placed on screen, without much attention to symmetry or proportion, with large patches of negative space on the right/lower side (at least on 1920x1280, particularly glaring when browsing TV material, for which there is no meta-data.) Then there are the spacing issues, the general disregard for VMC interface conventions (menu items fading, background, etc., and even the covers in tile view appear to be of different sizes.)

BTW, I had posted some of these points on the Video Browser forum, with a bit more detail, but without any reaction from the developers, I had to assume they are of no concern.

I do appreciate the effort, but I do agree the project has gone in a direction, which at least IMO is not a good one. The early versions may not have been perfect (what is?), but they had the right bone-structure, me thinks.

hi musictype, im sure sam will find your post useful, more feedback can only be a good thing after all eh :-).

paul.

I would like to respond to the comments about this project going in the wrong direction.

What exactly about 1.1.5 was so much better than the current version?

- Was it the fact that when you navigated forwards it did not display the image correctly for the first item?

- Was it the fact it would not remember all your view settings (what was the view set to? what was the sorting set to?) when navigating back to folders?

- Was it the fact the triple type just appeared to stop working randomly sometimes?

- Maybe it was the fact we did not support a bunch of media types with perceived type of video?

- Or maybe it was the way the UI got consistently stuck when holding down the down button in poster view?

- Maybe it was the fact you had to wait a long time to get the sort orders to show up and the way it seemed slow when navigating to a folder with lots of movies?

- Maybe it was the way poster view would display a stock image without any indication of what the movie was if no image existed.

We have done a lot, the engine is much better than it ever was, the project is about to move into its beta phase. I have nothing against making this thing skinnable, I have nothing against tweeking the UI where it makes sense.

Users wanted a UI that looks like media center, and we delivered, sure stuff may need tweeking but these things take time.

And... what I do not have is time, this project has cost me a lot of time, time I could have been using to make money. I have made 0 dollars to date on this project. I created VideoBrowser to fill a need I had, and I am very proud of where it is at. I would love to see more contributors. UI mockups / wiki editing / testing / developing or whatever helps.

I try to respond to my forum in a timely fashion, sometimes stuff can slip through the cracks, just post a followup if you feel you have not got a response on time.

I don't think fixing bugs is what people meant by going the wrong direction.

You say that users wanted a UI like media center but the one that is out currently isn't really like media center, as media center uses horizontal scrolling. Did you actually ask them whether they would prefer a vertical scrolling view that had a unique style or if they wanted a media center view clone? pretty sure 95% would have opted for the clone.

I'd love to see the simplicity of a DVD LIbrary view implemented in the future.

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c2d 6600 | 2gb Ram | 7800gt Gfx | Vista Ultimate x86

tom_son:

I don't think fixing bugs is what people meant by going the wrong direction.

You say that users wanted a UI like media center but the one that is out currently isn't really like media center, as media center uses horizontal scrolling. Did you actually ask them whether they would prefer a vertical scrolling view that had a unique style or if they wanted a media center view clone? pretty sure 95% would have opted for the clone.

I'd love to see the simplicity of a DVD LIbrary view implemented in the future.

Personally, I HATE the horizontal scroll of DVD Library and it is the #1 reason I do not use it.  The poster view of Video Browser is exactly what I want.  As a matter of fact, I would love  a similar poster view for the music section as well.

sambo99:

...
What exactly about 1.1.5 was so much better than the current version?...

... I have nothing against making this thing skinnable, I have nothing against tweeking the UI where it makes sense.

Users wanted a UI that looks like media center, and we delivered, sure stuff may need tweeking but these things take time.

And... what I do not have is time, this project has cost me a lot of time, time I could have been using to make money....

Sam, it's the UI of the versions prior to 1.1.5, that was tighter, not the engine. The UI was just visually stronger, simpler. It did not try to follow the VMC UI conventions, but its simplicity made it work very well, without clashing.

The new UI breaks up the information on screen, and presents it in a largely weaker visual manner. It sort of approximates the VMC interface, but it fails to achieve the graphic fluidity (and simplicity) of VMC. In List view, there are a bunch of assets of competing weight, kind of strewn about the page. I personally find the tiled view a bit overwhelming (busy) on a large screen and tiring to look at.

Perhaps making the plugin skinnable would be a good solution.

Anyway, I guess I was just venting last night (downloaded the latest version to test, then got frustrated with the UI and installed 1.1.4:-)

P.S. I looked before, but didn't find a PayPal account for you. I am sure a few here would be happy to send a few $$ to help the project.

I can see why some wouldn't like the vertical scrolling, its something a bit different and it will take a bit of playing around with to get used to it.
I myself like the horizontal scroll,  i like it coz im used to it.
But i am sure the the whole vertical scroll would be cool also, would be a cool idea for the plugin neglected music collection.

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Always willing to help.

Musictype:

The new UI breaks up the information on screen, and presents it in a largely weaker visual manner.

I ask this in the most sincere way possible what does that even mean? Can you provide a Mock-Up of how you think the UI should look? How do you recommend to fix this?  Give me some concrete examples with a solution!

Musictype:

It sort of approximates the VMC interface, but it fails to achieve the graphic fluidity (and simplicity) of VMC.

The goal was to "look-like" VMC not copy VMC at verbatim. How many people like using the built in VMC Videos section to browse videos? - not many, in fact the VMC video section sucks is precisely because it follows the generic VMC UI template (great for 80% of tasks). If VideoBrowser mirrors VMC explicitly what advantage does it provide? It provides nothing. 

I am choosing to ignore the graphic fludity part of your statement for two reasons: 1) This is ALPHA software. 2) We haven't worked on animations at all because there are other higher priority issues to resolve first.

Musictype:

In List view, there are a bunch of assets of competing weight, kind of strewn about the page.

Finally you describe an issue I can actually respond to instead of guessing what you mean, so the list view from 1.4 to 1.11 has changed for the worse? Lets do a comparison side by side first shall we?

1.4

1.11

You gotta help me out here because I when I look at both pictures I can't think of one advantage 1.4 has over 1.11. In my opinion the fact that 1.11 breaks up the UI into distinct areas is a huge benefit. The menu options are distanced means I can quickly distinguish where the episode list begins and ends. The series name and description are placed higher on the interface where user's eyes naturally fall to. 

I suppose the black background is kinda cool but surely that can't be your justification can it... ? I mean even this still looks better than 1.4:

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I too like the new layouts much better, I think its just bias to the black background that is causing all this cuffufle.

If there is any dev out there that would like to help with making this thing skinnable just let me know. We welcome contributions.

I really didn't mean to be disrespectful of the work, and perhaps gave-in to my momentary frustration above. I am actually immensely grateful for it.

I'll try to explain: I didn't mean to say that the old layout should be the the end-all, or that the new split one is a bad idea. My gripe was, that the old, pre 1.1.5 version layout, was more impactfull, while browsing titles. It had a large icon, which filled out the space better, and it was simple.

Soutaker's images are taken from screens, which do in fact present the new layout in better light.

But in my experience, there are more views where it doesn't look as neat. If you browse titles in list view, and there isn't enough description copy, then you have a fairly small, lonely title icon in the upper left, separated from the dividing line and from the bottom of the screen by a considerable patch of emptiness, then after the titles to right of the line, there is another considerable patch of emptiness to the right and to the bottom edges of the screen. At least this is how it looks on my 1080p screen (60".) Also, the actual dividing line seems to have missed the "golden" placement rule (divide by equal segments,) and it kind of floats there.

As to the black, yeah, I must admit I was partial to it, since I've modified my background to be sort of black, as seen here: http://bbs.wasnotwas.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=70 You'll also see some of my initial gripes as well.

Musictype:

in my experience, there are more views where it doesn't look as neat. If you browse titles in list view, and there isn't enough description copy, then you have a fairly small, lonely title icon in the upper left, separated from the dividing line and from the bottom of the screen by a considerable patch of emptiness, then after the titles to right of the line, there is another considerable patch of emptiness to the right and to the bottom edges of the screen. At least this is how it looks on my 1080p screen (60".) Also, the actual dividing line seems to have missed the "golden" placement rule (divide by equal segments,) and it kind of floats there.

This all boils down to creating a single interface for multiple screen dimensions. I see the same areas of "emptiness" on my 102" screen; when constructing the new interface we optimized for the full 1080p experience, however, several users are not using full HD, and in fact many more are still not on widescreen displays instead using the old 4x3 screen. So while we could optimize it for our large displays, it left a lot of other users with a interface that is unworkable.

Musictype:

As to the black, yeah, I must admit I was partial to it, since I've modified my background to be sort of black, as seen here: http://bbs.wasnotwas.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=70 You'll also see some of my initial gripes as well.

A headsup, I anticipate a new version scheduled to come out on Monday/Tuesday that will allow users to set a transparent background as a configuration setting. This will allow for a custom modified backgrounds to be displayed, or you can choose to keep the default VideoBrowser background.

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Thanks for the transparency option!

Are there any plans to mask the file names ("Lost S01E03") and instead show real titles ("3: Tabula Rasa")?

soultaker:

So while we could optimize it for our large displays, it left a lot of other users with a interface that is unworkable.

Simple: Vista's media center was desinged for use on a widescreen, therefore any plugin for VMC should be layed out for a widescreen display.  This is common among many plugins, such as myTV.  I'm sure many widescreen users find the empty space just as unpleasant as the non-widescreen users finding things cramped or cut off.