Possible Visualizations
#1
Hey All!

So I've had the "^3" or cubed music player installed on my phone for a little while, and since I don't listen to a whole lot of music on my phone it didn't get a lot of use, but I always really liked it's main visualization, it's basically a cube that you spin and on each of it's faces it has an album's art (horizontal spin moved through the alphabet and vertical within a letter). The thing I particularly like about the interface is how speedy and responsive it is.

Anyway the developer Filipe Lameiro Abrantes recently added a new visualization called "Morph Flow" that as soon as I saw it I just thought how amazing it would be for flipping through movie posters on the XBMC Remote. Now I haven't really delved all that much into it, but Cubed is open source and after looking at the source it's quite straight forward, and very compatible with the XBMC Remote.

Anyway I'm not sure of the licensing of the Cubed source (it's not clear from the source headers or the github repository) but I was thinking of getting in touch with Filipe just to see if it would be ok with him for me to try to spin off his work on Cubed into this project. Before I went to that trouble though I thought I'd check in here and see what people thought.

Here are some screen shots of the interface in action, though to get a really good feel for it it'd be best to download it:

Link: Image

Mesh In Action: Image

Mesh Drag: Image

Anyway curious what everyone's thoughts are! And as always love the remote!

Cheers,
Alden

Edit - Wrong name for the new Cubed visualization!
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#2
Quick update, I got the green light from Filipe so I'm going to start tinkering around with generalizing his visualization in a way that would make it easy to tie into XBMC Remote.

Though I'm not expecting to have too much time to attack the problem, if anyone is interested in helping drop me a line here.

Cheers,
Alden
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#3
Sounds awesome. Can't wait to try it Smile
(Sorry, can't really help you, I'm too busy atm)
XBMCLive Dharma beta 2 running on an ASRock ION 330 HT
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#4
Sounds great indeed. Keep us posted about your progress. If you have a POC working, we can start integrating it, but for me fixing bugs have priority at the moment.
Running XBMC on my HTPC, tablet, phone and pinball machine.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forums before posting. Do NOT e-mail Team-XBMC members asking for support. For troubleshooting and bug reporting, make sure you read this first.
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#5
Just tested it and I'm very impressed by the smoothness. Also for the wall view I'll most certainly will take a peak into the sources!
Running XBMC on my HTPC, tablet, phone and pinball machine.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forums before posting. Do NOT e-mail Team-XBMC members asking for support. For troubleshooting and bug reporting, make sure you read this first.
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#6
Yeah totally, Filipe definitely offered to lend a helping hand if I got suck, in the meantime I have a lot of familiarizing to do with the source on the remote side (and android in general), but I'm like to see all of those visualizations make it in form.

At the moment my plan is to add another sliding tab, probably first to the music library and try to recreate those interfaces on top of the image backend of the remote. I don't expect it to be very hard, though this weekend is looking a little crazy so I probably won't get around to a first incarnation till next week sometime.

Cheers,
Alden
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#7
Oh hand't noticed before, but the "Boring" view is actually really slick for a text only interface, perhaps there would be a way to utilize that perhaps even for the front menu. Hmmm too many possibilities Smile
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#8
My first goal would be to implement the wall view and replace current TV show list with it, because it lags as hell.

I've had a look at the code and the wall view alone is 1500 lines. I'm not very familiar with OpenGL, so that would take a while for me to proper implement. Is Filipe hanging around in here? Smile
Running XBMC on my HTPC, tablet, phone and pinball machine.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forums before posting. Do NOT e-mail Team-XBMC members asking for support. For troubleshooting and bug reporting, make sure you read this first.
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#9
I told him about the project (and mentioned a link) and have been emailing a little with him, I'll slip a link to this thread into the next message I send him.

Also if you'd like to get in touch with him yourself he responded to me almost immediately and his email is listed on the market with the app, or you can find his contact info @ http://abrantix.org/about.php?r=2

Unfortunately I haven't gotten to see much of the TV interface due to that bug you fixed earlier today that was crashing XBMC, but tonight I'll switch over to the newer version of XBMC and check it out.

I was planning to start with Albums as I figured it would require the least fiddling with the existing Cubed source, that would give me a chance to get familiar with the openGL part without having to make too many modifications.

-Alden
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#10
Sounds good. Maybe I'll drop him a message too in case I'll get to have a closer look at it.

Cheers!
Running XBMC on my HTPC, tablet, phone and pinball machine.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forums before posting. Do NOT e-mail Team-XBMC members asking for support. For troubleshooting and bug reporting, make sure you read this first.
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#11
So spent a couple hours last night trying to extract the central visualization last night and confirmed it's tricky (heh). I got a seperate app just loading any of the 4 Renderers (Wall, Morph, Boring or Cube), but I broke the touch control and it was still loading the bitmaps from the SD card where the main app stores them.

I probably won't have much more time before Monday to play with it, but based on what I did last night I think it's very doable!

-Alden
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#12
I've been playing around with this idea some (in the code), but realized that I don't really have the time to do it right (I've done a few hack-ish partial integrations, more proof of concept type things like adding a GL Surface to the Music Library and then adding a subset of the RockOn code to that surface). Anyway I was wondering if anyone else had taken a look at this and/or if I should add this to the tracker as an enhancement for some future version of the software.

From what I've done so far it seems like the initial integration shouldn't be too hard most of my difficulty came from my lack of familiarity with both projects (found myself trying to find a way to have them meet in the middle rather than understanding the remote fully and adapting Cubed to it).

I think the big pay off here would be in creating custom animations once the framework was in place, but the 4 examples included in RockOn would be more than enough to show off the capability and knock people's socks off.

Cheers,
Alden
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#13
I've taken a closer look at it and managed to throw the gl surface into album view. Need to properly cache the bitmaps now, but I'm getting there.
Running XBMC on my HTPC, tablet, phone and pinball machine.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forums before posting. Do NOT e-mail Team-XBMC members asking for support. For troubleshooting and bug reporting, make sure you read this first.
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#14
I've created a new branch for it:

Code:
https://android-xbmcremote.googlecode.com/svn/branches/rockon-gl

Integration is terrible and the covers don't display correctly yet, but the base is there. I've only taken the wall view though.
Running XBMC on my HTPC, tablet, phone and pinball machine.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forums before posting. Do NOT e-mail Team-XBMC members asking for support. For troubleshooting and bug reporting, make sure you read this first.
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#15
That's awesome, saw your updates today... very cool! I'll definitely check out the branch.

Cheers,
Alden
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