2012-10-29, 14:28
I've only been fiddling with XBMC, and only a little, as time permits, for just two or three weeks now. I'm still trying to get a handle on the whole thing, and doing my best to understand the thing, based on what seems to be... well... less than optimal documentation (e.g. in the wiki).
I'm not at all sure that I have properly grasped the structure of XBMC, so I need to ask what amounts to rather a basic question. But first let me give a bit of background...
I gravitated to XBMC in the first place because I was led to believe that it was/is "highly customizable". (I assumed that this meant that it could be customized to a great extent _without_ actually dredging into the C++ source code. Not that I really mind all that much dredging into C++ source code, but, you know, a requirement for C++ hacking skills is not normally something that I personally tend to associate with products being touted to the general public at large as "highly customizable.")
So anyway, I'm now wondering to what extent that characterization... of XBMC as being "highly customizable"... really gives a newcomer an accurate impression of the thing.
I'm just going to throw out a rather trivial example, and see if maybe someone here will (I actually hope) show me how my current impression is wrong, and how XBMC is indeed "highly customizable" after all.
OK, silly example: Let's say that I want to customize my copy of xbmc+Confluence so that whenever I am looking at a photograph, if I hit the "5" key on my keyboard, the effect will be for the display of the current still picture to be removed from the screen and replaced instead by a display of the preceding .JPG file in the current directory (if any).
Simple enough, right?
Can this "customization" be done by any Joe Schmo off the street _without_ him having to learn C++ first?
Can this customization be effected merely and exclusively by fiddling relevant .xml files, and without ever touching any C++ source file?
My initial impression is that the answer is "no", and I'll explain why...
I am looking at the source for the following function:
bool CGUIWindowSlideShow::OnAction(const CAction &action)
which exists within a file called xbmc-11.0/xbmc/pictures/GUIWindowSlideShow.cpp
and am getting the general impression from the body of this function that action bindings for specific keys are in fact rather entirely hardwired, and not readily amenable to ordinary end-luser fiddling/rebinding (short of hacking this specific C++ source file, that is).
Is that a correct impression on my part? Or have I gotten it all wrong?
I'm not at all sure that I have properly grasped the structure of XBMC, so I need to ask what amounts to rather a basic question. But first let me give a bit of background...
I gravitated to XBMC in the first place because I was led to believe that it was/is "highly customizable". (I assumed that this meant that it could be customized to a great extent _without_ actually dredging into the C++ source code. Not that I really mind all that much dredging into C++ source code, but, you know, a requirement for C++ hacking skills is not normally something that I personally tend to associate with products being touted to the general public at large as "highly customizable.")
So anyway, I'm now wondering to what extent that characterization... of XBMC as being "highly customizable"... really gives a newcomer an accurate impression of the thing.
I'm just going to throw out a rather trivial example, and see if maybe someone here will (I actually hope) show me how my current impression is wrong, and how XBMC is indeed "highly customizable" after all.
OK, silly example: Let's say that I want to customize my copy of xbmc+Confluence so that whenever I am looking at a photograph, if I hit the "5" key on my keyboard, the effect will be for the display of the current still picture to be removed from the screen and replaced instead by a display of the preceding .JPG file in the current directory (if any).
Simple enough, right?
Can this "customization" be done by any Joe Schmo off the street _without_ him having to learn C++ first?
Can this customization be effected merely and exclusively by fiddling relevant .xml files, and without ever touching any C++ source file?
My initial impression is that the answer is "no", and I'll explain why...
I am looking at the source for the following function:
bool CGUIWindowSlideShow::OnAction(const CAction &action)
which exists within a file called xbmc-11.0/xbmc/pictures/GUIWindowSlideShow.cpp
and am getting the general impression from the body of this function that action bindings for specific keys are in fact rather entirely hardwired, and not readily amenable to ordinary end-luser fiddling/rebinding (short of hacking this specific C++ source file, that is).
Is that a correct impression on my part? Or have I gotten it all wrong?