Support for Animated Backgrounds??

[grooves12]

Is is possible to do animated background images for SageTV, similar to many of the animated images used in the menus of Tivo boxes?

[CollinR]

I dunno about animated but you can always do full on full motion video.

[GKusnick]

Animated GIFs are not supported, if that's what you mean.

Background video is supported, but there's a limit of one video stream per client. So you couldn't use this for background animation and also have a video preview window on the same menu. It would also stop playback of any recorded program or imported video every time you displayed such a background video.

What you can do is dynamically change the size, location, color, transparency, etc. of menu elements in real time. So for instance you could emulate the sliding and zooming background text typical of Tivo menus. Or construct an animated collage of colored shapes and images that move around in the background. There's a section of the Studio tutorial on animation that goes into more detail about this.

[evilpenguin]

I think Narflex posted a demo STV that had this a while back...

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15987

It's dangerously outdated, but it should give you an idea of how to do it.