Home Theater topology and Xlobby

[Roscoe62]

Maybe a PPC FAQ would be a good idea, although at the moment there's not too much to put in it.

So far I haven't spent that much time skinning on the PPC. I've played with setting up some custom control screens, and getting buttons to control macros I've set up in the event manager and it's all worked well, but they've just been experiments rather than anything of substance. I've been really busy building a media server and up until now it hasn't left me any spare time.

However I finally finished our media server last night, so the next step for me is dividing my time between populating the server with our CDs & DVDs and designing the interface for our system - which means getting the PPC stuff to work properly.

Mfan has already done a lot of great work with his PPC translation of Colby's skin so he will be a good source of information, and if Jowaldo ever posts the next version of his skin there's going to be plenty of idea fodder there to use.

Another thing to bear in mind is that because XLobby is so flexible, each person who creates a skin has designed it to meet the requirements of their own situation.....and every one is different, not only graphically but functionally, so the likelihood of getting someone's skin to match what you want to do "out-of-the-box" is really quite small. I think the best approach is to see which of the skins produced comes closest to matching your own requirements and then make whatever alterations are necessary. I'm sure I'm stating the obvious though.

Anyway, as far as the XLobby PPC client goes, I think if we could get Steven to get the bugs out of the auto-refresh and support for hard buttons in place I honestly believe the floodgates will open and we'd have the ultimate HTPC frontend and control system at our disposal.

Roscoe

[MFan]

Here is a set of 2 tv skins I have put together for the ppc. They use colby's theme and are designed for a sony tv with SA cable box. They work through girder to send ir signals to the tv/cable box through a usbuirt. They make use of discrete on-off signals for the tv, but this is not available for the cable box. They can be readily changed for any tv/cable box,either through girder of xlobby events.

http://webpages.charter.net/mfan/MFan%20TV.zip

To use:

unzip
put the xmls in colbyskin
put the buttons in the buttongroups in colbyskin
put the event groups in eventgroups in colbyskin
put the gml in girder

Let me know if I can help you out with these. I will be out in California for a start-up for the next 5 weeks, so I will not being doing much work in creating screens, but can answer questions if there are any.

Good luck in experimenting and these should give you a feel for using an xlobby ppc as a remote.

Don

[Cosworth]

Thanks a lot MFan - very useful!

Roscoe: didn't know there was so little to put in a PPC FAQ - point taken. To get started with Xlobby it's very helpful to get your hands on variations of a skin like the one from MFan. Second best thing to having the full documentation.

I agree with the auto refresh, and hard button issues. Perhaps I should join the Chorus in "feature requests".
I'm still looking for the "redirect output from ppc to tv and vice versa" function. I suppose it would work similar to audio zones. Perhaps it doesn't exist?

Thanks for all your helpful comments!

[gravy]

Count me in as a new PPC guy - just got an ipaq 4150 for my birthday, and setup the PPC client yesterday. I would LOVE to see some of the idea's in this thread addressed as well!

And accordingly, I think a PPC forum is a great idea!