How To: Main Menu FanArt...for now.

[Mtlca401]

FanArt has become very popular on these forums every since the latest release of SageMC. I realized that the functionality for FanArt was already there (courtesy of the menu icons in dymanic menus), but just needed to be tweaked a bit to get it working on the main menu and other menus as well. I am not sure if anyone else has thought of this, but since nobody posted I thought I would post my import.

Before you read the steps below, make a backup of your configuration. I have only tested this on sageMC 6.3.7 and 6.3.8. You might even want to import the .xml file first before you go through with the other steps.

What to do first:

• right click on the main menu and goto Customize Screen Layout
• change the Menu Style to text or htext.
• make sure Main Icon Panel is checked.
• Size the Main Icon Panel to it's fullsize (you'll notice that it doesn't maximize to fullscreen).

For dynamic menus:
change the main menu icons to the FanArt image you wish to use.

Installation:

• shutdown sagetv
• download this file: menuEnhancementsForFanArt.zip
• extract (preserve the file structure)
• import this file into sagetv then restart

This import has no configuration. It simple changes the Main Icon Panel to sit behind all other items and allows you to size it to fullscreen. It also changes the transparency of the temp from 100 to 200 because it is hard to see the temp with busy backgrounds. This import is not reversable...yet.


I think that's it. All items (weather, disk space bar, clock, htext...) should be in front of the FanArt image. Preview Panel does not work that great because it sits behind the Main Icon Panel. If any one knows a way to fix this I would love to know. I have not put this in the download section yet because I would like to get the preview panel in front of the FanArt first.


Here are some screenshots of my layout:




Hovering over MyTV


Hover over Weather


I will post my layout file along with the htext background image and font.

[Mtlca401]

Here is my layout file, font and image file to use for the htext.

[popechild]

Wow, that looks really nice. If nothing else I want to try out that font. One question - it looks like your FanArt backgrounds are darker than normal. Are you doing something manually to the images to darken them? Whether on the main menu or sub-menus, backgrounds can really intrude on the menu in front of them, and your pics make me realize that making them all a bit darker might really help. This wouldn't be too hard to do manually for the "permanent" menu backgrounds, but I wonder if there's any way to have Sage do it in the display mechanism so that it could be applied to all the media-related FanArt that would take forever to do manually?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by popechild

Wow, that looks really nice. If nothing else I want to try out that font. One question - it looks like your FanArt backgrounds are darker than normal. Are you doing something manually to the images to darken them? Whether on the main menu or sub-menus, backgrounds can really intrude on the menu in front of them, and your pics make me realize that making them all a bit darker might really help. This wouldn't be too hard to do manually for the "permanent" menu backgrounds, but I wonder if there's any way to have Sage do it in the display mechanism so that it could be applied to all the media-related FanArt that would take forever to do manually?

You can create a semi-transparent background overlay image. It will apply to all menus, but it should give you what you want. I also added the option for shaded menu backgrounds to deal with this as well.

Aloha,
Mike

[popechild]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

You can create a semi-transparent background overlay image. It will apply to all menus, but it should give you what you want. I also added the option for shaded menu backgrounds to deal with this as well.

Aloha,
Mike

You are, for real, the man.

Is the background overlay image defined in the theme.properties file somewhere? And where do I messwith the shaded menu background option?

[bialio]

Very cool Mtlca401! I hadn't considered that approach to main menu fan-art. It's got me thinking though! One of the things I like about the AEON skin on xmbc is the background that changes based on the menu selection - looks like this makes that somewhat possible......

MikeInMaui - what would be super cool here is if when scrolling around in the Recent recordings widget, the menu icon (which is really fan-art in this scenario) could change to be the fanart (if it exists) for the selected show .....

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by bialio

MikeInMaui - what would be super cool here is if when scrolling around in the Recent recordings widget, the menu icon (which is really fan-art in this scenario) could change to be the fanart (if it exists) for the selected show .....

I might not get a chance to play with this for a few days, but if you want to try it out, I think you just need to have the recordings widget set AiringForBackground when the new item gains focus. In a FocusGained() hook, you would call

AddStaticContext( "AiringForBackground", Airing )
(maybe followed by a Refresh() if there isn't one called already)

where Airing is the variable name used to store the current airing in the recordings widget. That should be all it takes to get the fanart background to appear. Let me know how it goes if you want to try it out, otherwise I'll play with it when I get the chance.

Aloha,
Mike

[Mtlca401]

Originally Posted by popechild

You are, for real, the man.

Is the background overlay image defined in the theme.properties file somewhere? And where do I messwith the shaded menu background option?

Actually, its just a dark carbon background. The opacity for the Main Icon Panel is set to 0.75 which is an option in the Customize Screen Layout. This lets me use the texture from the carbon background.

[popechild]

Originally Posted by Mtlca401

Actually, its just a dark carbon background. The opacity for the Main Icon Panel is set to 0.75 which is an option in the Customize Screen Layout. This lets me use the texture from the carbon background.

And where does one find this carbon background? (I assume whatever the image is, you're using it as the background.jpg in the theme?)

[popechild]

Okay, just played around with this a bit, and I really, really like it. Excellent job, Mtika. I've got a few issues and a few questions, if you'll indulge me, since it doesn't look like you've received much specific feedback yet:

1) Definitely do whatever can be done to fix the preview panel. It's painful for me to not be able to use that.

2) Where do you define the icons for weather and the shutdown icon? They don't appear to be definable using the typical Main Menu "set icon" option, at least as far as I can find.

3) My Fan Art is sitting behind most of the other elements, but it's still in front of the clock, the shutdown icon, and the conflict icon. If I have the transparency setting set to 1.0, I can't set these at all. I tried your layout file and it looks the same.

4) What's the red highlighting for on the recorded/upcoming shows in your pics? It doesn't seem to do that on mine, even when I'm using your layout file, and I can't figure out from your pictures what the significance is.

5) I'm not sure if this falls in your area, or under general FanArt stuff, but the images won't stretch as large as needed, or as far right as the edge of the screen on the HD100 extender. It works great on the server, but on the extender I can tell when I'm stretching them that it's not getting to the edge, and I'm left with a black strip along the right side. I have the same image set as the background for Music as I use for the main music page. On the server, the images are exactly the same, but on the HD100 there's a noticeable jump in position and/or size when clicking the Music menu item to go to the main Music page.

6) It's definitely a bit slow on the extender. It seems like it will cache a few of the images, but then once you get past those it will take a second or so to load the next one. Then the original ones that were cached aren't anymore and the next time you go to those they take a second or so. Any way you know of to get it to speed up the loading?

Otherwise, this is very cool. Many thanks!

[bialio]

I played with this some last night - thanks for the good idea!

There are definitely some areas that still need to move forward - the ones popechild lists in number 3 above. I can point you at those if you need me to - the change (which I think you did in your STVi) is just to put them on the LayerForeground Animation layer.

I suspect what will kill this dead is the Extender aspect - full size images can be slow. Although I wonder if maybe it's better on the 200 than the 100......

btl.

[Mtlca401]

Originally Posted by popechild

Okay, just played around with this a bit, and I really, really like it. Excellent job, Mtika. I've got a few issues and a few questions, if you'll indulge me, since it doesn't look like you've received much specific feedback yet:

1) Definitely do whatever can be done to fix the preview panel. It's painful for me to not be able to use that.

2) Where do you define the icons for weather and the shutdown icon? They don't appear to be definable using the typical Main Menu "set icon" option, at least as far as I can find.

3) My Fan Art is sitting behind most of the other elements, but it's still in front of the clock, the shutdown icon, and the conflict icon. If I have the transparency setting set to 1.0, I can't set these at all. I tried your layout file and it looks the same.

4) What's the red highlighting for on the recorded/upcoming shows in your pics? It doesn't seem to do that on mine, even when I'm using your layout file, and I can't figure out from your pictures what the significance is.

5) I'm not sure if this falls in your area, or under general FanArt stuff, but the images won't stretch as large as needed, or as far right as the edge of the screen on the HD100 extender. It works great on the server, but on the extender I can tell when I'm stretching them that it's not getting to the edge, and I'm left with a black strip along the right side. I have the same image set as the background for Music as I use for the main music page. On the server, the images are exactly the same, but on the HD100 there's a noticeable jump in position and/or size when clicking the Music menu item to go to the main Music page.

6) It's definitely a bit slow on the extender. It seems like it will cache a few of the images, but then once you get past those it will take a second or so to load the next one. Then the original ones that were cached aren't anymore and the next time you go to those they take a second or so. Any way you know of to get it to speed up the loading?

Otherwise, this is very cool. Many thanks!

1) I am not really sure how to fix this. Maybe someone can help with this issue.

2) For the weather, just copy the picture to the theme folder you use, under /MenuIcons, and name it to hover_my weather.png (.jpg will not work, I just renamed it to .png, I know that's not they way to do that, but it works). I don't have an image for the shutdown Icon. For MyTV, do the same thing but rename it hover_my tv.png.

3) I will look into the shutdown icon. It is not like that on mine. Also, you must have the clock set as compact. I thought I fixed that, but I guess not. As far as the conflict recordings, I never even thought about that. I will fix these soon.

4) I think the red on the Recent and Upcoming recordings are from the nBlue theme. They are also current recordings. Try out that theme, and let me know.

5) & 6) I don't have an extender. There is know way for me to test this.

I will post the carbon background in the downloads section along with a few others.