[ridger81]

It’s a completely different platform, and it’s too early at this stage to know. Another team might develop a media player for the 3DS… that’s if homebrew is possible. So it’s kinda useless asking here…

[ridger81]

AFAIK the new UI isn’t being developed, at least not yet. I’m happy to contribute when the others have time, but I’m pretty sure Tantric has his hands full with bug fixes etc. already…

[ridger81]

Nope, WiiMC is staying on the Wii… the XMB does everything except for NTFS. Someone else may come out with a homebrew media player, but that’s unlikely due to Sony’s current stance on homebrew.

[ridger81]

Also, two mockups for in-video settings (would slide up after selecting the “Settings” cog next to the controls).

First, settings menu (could easily add more if needed):

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And secondly, this is what you’d see after making a selection. Instructions would appear at the top of the screen, icon in the middle and back button at the bottom. Corners are only there to help position the screen, they wouldn’t be present in say the Brightness or Subtitle modes.

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None of these use rounded gradients or anything so images should be easily tileable.

[ridger81]

View full size (not blurry at all)

Here’s a mockup of the videos menu with metadata pane. Couldn’t really figure out a way to get the WiiMC logo in there at a good enough size without getting in the way, so I’ve just reduced it to the equalizer for now. I’ll work on it.

Also, excuse the old videos icon. Won’t be using it in the final version.

[ridger81]

Just a quick reply to address some of the things you guys have mentioned…

The rounded gradient is approximately 70kb PNG-24, if you want to half it and flip it, it reduces down to 35kb.

Reflection did look kinda cool but I think it doesn’t work in this case… nice work though!

I’m not too fussed about the glass effect, I but didn’t have it in mind when I created it. If you guys think it’d look good I don’t really mind, but in the end it’s really Tantric/rodries’ decision.

[ridger81]

The glass doesn’t look too bad at all! I didn’t use it in the first place though cause there’s not really anything in WiiMC that looks glassy. I’ll have a go and see if I can get it looking awesome.

When you refer to the rounded overlay, do you mean the glass? I can see what I can do by fitting it into the endcap area.

Not too attached to the reflection, though… it kinda makes the bar seem “grounded”, if that makes sense? It would probably look kinda strange when it’s overlaid over the video.

We could definitely make the progress bar shorter height-wise, but we have to keep in mind that people aren’t going to use the drag control every time – some will want to jump straight to a certain point. Therefore we can’t make it too small as users should be able to comfortably point and click on the bar without issues.

I’ll have to check how large the fade PNG is when I get home – what’s the approximate size limit?

Your implementation of cacheing sounds great, I use a 2GB SD card with nothing really on it so that should be plenty of space.

[ridger81]

WiiMC is a media center, not an application suite. Opera for Wii is fine (you’re not going to find a better web browser for the Wii), and there are countless other file managers you can use.

The developers already have enough on their plate managing the media center functions alone…

[ridger81]

Okay, I see your point with the meta pane. Maybe we should wait and see how it works in practice – then we can test and see if the sliding becomes an issue 🙂 Any plans on caching the metadata? It would probably ease up on the network but could turn into a storage problem… I think it’s a good point to consider, regardless.

I’ve got no problems with leaving a space for notifications, even if they don’t show up in the final versions 🙂

Here’s the initial mockup of the new video controls. I took a few cues from your initial “fading in” style to make the controls seem kinda borderless.

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Here’s a new idea – a dragable progress bar. i.e. when you roll over the timeline, the control appears and you can click and/or drag it to fast-forward/rewind. When you roll out, the control disappears. Let me know if this is possible – it could be a big jump in usability.
Mockup of controls with dragable progress bar
(this also shows what the controls would look like without the metadata)

Alternate views:
With notifications
Controls on black background
Controls on white background (still easy to read)

These mockups are all only widescreen for now – 4:3 TV’s would just show less metadata and have a smaller progress bar.

[ridger81]

Metadata and time sounds awesome. However maybe notifications/weather should remain optional? Most of the people I know using WiiMC would probably have no use for notifications, however the weather could come in handy.

Tantric, is it possible to change the layout width from 4:3 to 16:9 depending on the Wii’s widescreen settings? (Maybe WiiMC already does this, can’t test as I’m not home at the moment). It would be much easier (from a GUI design perspective) to have a basic, uniform design, and simply resize controls/lists depending on the aspect ratio.

TVDB works great for converters and the like. Don’t think we should completely hide the meta pane though if WiiMC can’t get a suitable match for one show though… it would probably get a little too confusing scrolling through the list and seeing the sidebar appear and disappear. There should definitely be an option to disable the pane altogether if the user chooses.

I’ve made a simple mockup based on your original design (just refining the look, more along the lines of the current WiiMC style, but a little sleeker. Placement is generally the same) – I’ll upload it when I get home.

Is it possible to have the controls fade/slide in when you bring them up? Not important, but would be a nice touch.

[ridger81]

Some nice ideas here! The original design was created in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but now that it’s in widescreen some of these ideas are possible. Didn’t really think about a menu at the top of the screen, but it’s an awesome idea if there’s any buttons we can’t fit in the bottom control panel.

Tantric, I’d be happy to work on some updates of the GUI design alongside this, if you’d like.

[ridger81]

Yup, I created this design when I had only a tiny idea of how the program was going to work.
That’s why the design changed – we realized early on that major modifications had to be made, due to the many functions of the program.
And frankly, I prefer the design we ended up with. The old one wasn’t very pointer-friendly…

[ridger81]

That’ll do fine, thanks!

[ridger81]

I have the same problem (although it happens on and off and my HDD is FAT32).

Sometimes I can hit home and get back into the WiiMC menu (with the video paused), but it seems after drilling down into a few folders it crashes…

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