Extensible Item Menu

‘Info’ button is reserved for Media Center and not available for 3rd party applications.

Yes please

We need item actions!

I have 2 thoughts on this.

1. We can use the ‘info’ button but it is a pain in the behind to get working, it will have to wait till we have a service and can hook it up.
2. Better still, I have recently tried to force a details screen for ALL items, so below refresh we can add a few more buttons.

I completely approve this concept but it needs careful design.

Some examples:

1. Pinning items
2. Downloading trailers and podcasts
3. Bookmarks

Yes, details screens are obvious places to put such things but I think that will be left up to theme designers. We still need a popup, I think though, because you need to be able to take action on things above the detail level (folders, series, seasons…).

Any ideas on a button/action we could use for this?

Think about converting the popup play menu into an action menu, might work and then there wouldn’t be multiple item specific menus. Also would be nice to have all item options combined into a easy to access list.

Yeah, I thought about that too. I have two stumbling blocks with that option though:

• Not very intuitive to hit “Play” to produce a menu that would pin something…
• I want “Play” to continue to be a fast way to play an item without having to go through other screens.

I'm kinda stuck as I can’t figure out a button that would work. I hate to make this something that will only work for folks with programmable remotes, but that may be what we're left with.

most media center remotes have a “display” key what about hooking into that and bringing up a menu with

1.Pinning items 2.Downloading trailers and podcasts 3.Bookmarks

I don’t have a “display” button :(

Yeah ebr, those were my thoughts as well. I was experimenting with a context menu, and I couldn’t get the “info” button to work without triggering the default MC action.

Tee hee… this is working! :)

A LOT more work to do, but it looks promising. These items were added to the menu by a plug-in…

And, notice, that the options are based on the selected item (this one has been watched so the option is to mark unwatched)

Awesome stuff!

One tricky thing with this is non-downloaded contents, how will we set it up so an ITunes trails can not play until they are downloaded?

Also we need to take all these buttons and show them on the details page.

Also after you click something like download, it should disable the download button and write downloading… on it

Oh was wondering if this was possible and looks fantastic let me know when its rolled into a trunk. I have a request for this feature if it comes about and we can make it do more. Wondering first off if this will work on extenders and if so would there be anyway to hit the info button for example on your movie folder and then a menu would pop up picking your sorting options such as genre, year, and then once you pick it the movies folder opens in the view choice you want. Trying to think about my kids and avoiding them going into the top menu in diamond and messing up all my hard work.

1. I don’t have an extender but I don’t see why this wouldn’t work the same as anything else.
2. We can’t really use the “info” button as MC wants that. Right now I've got it tied to “*” (instead of switching views). However, this as well as the specific presentation of the menu, can be modified by different themes. I suspect Rob will want to present his own icon-based menu for Vanilla.
3. As for doing the specific function you request, a plug-in could do that fairly easily, I believe. Actually, one of the things that worries me a little bit is that we will end up with so many different functions that managing the options in the menu could get hairy. But, if they are mostly done in plug-ins, it will be possible for people to only have the ones they want (without a hundred new config parameters).

I've tweaked the implementation a bit. Updates are in the design doc and in the branch on svn.

The reason I asked about extenders. The * key doesnt work on any of my 360’s to change the views which was never a big deal to me cause I know extenders arent your guys main concern. I would just set all my views up and everything on my computer before I would goto the 360. I went in and downloaded the latest trunk under the branches. When I hit * on the 360 official remote, or my harmony one I get nothing. When I hit the * key on my keyboard at the computer it changes views still. I am new to building these release so maybe I did something wrong, but I cant seem to get the * key to do anything on the 360.

It’s possible the * key doesn’t work on the 360. I don’t have one so I can’t test it. Post a question on the forums. I know a lot of people use those as extenders.

If that’s the case, I'm not really sure what we could do about it though…

I would post something on the forums if I could but no matter what email I use my account never gets activated on their… I have so many accounts I have tried to activate on there since the videobrowser days. I wish I could get on the forums because I need to post some requests to xzener for a few more icons.

EBR, just a heads up. I did try this on default theme on the PC and I get the item box but its empty no choices. I then enabled EHS because I have it disabled thinking it might make a difference. Quit out and came back in, went to one of my tv episodes hit * and the item box is empty. On diamond on the PC it changes view I only get the box on default. Once again if I didnt build this correctly could be just me.

You haven’t done anything wrong. Right now, there are no default options in the context menu. The ones you see in my screengrabs are put there by the “Crystal” theme which is my own hack of Diamond and is implemented as a plugin.

I need to add logic to not produce the menu if it has no options and we need to decide what default options we'd like in the menu.

On the forum thing, I remember I had a lot of trouble getting registered as well way back when. Shoot an email to Sam and he should be able to fix you up…

I've tweaked the implementation again (see design doc). It is now much more powerful but a little more complicated. Still work to be done on dealing with the EHS and a few other things but I really like how it is coming together.

Okay, I've got this working with the EHS now. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself :).

Default options are there for play, resume, mark/unmark, etc.

If anyone out there is brave give the ContexMenu branch a whirl and let me know what issues you find.

(I already know there is some situation where the menu can come up blank, but, once you manage to get a valid menu to appear, it doesn’t come up blank anymore. I'm sure its just an event I need to track down and initialevaluate or something…)

This is looking rather fine indeed! :)

I think this will be an excellent addition to Media Browser, allowing for a lot of advanced functionality without over-complicating the experience. Keep up the good work!

I'm loving this idea, and it works perfectly on my PC under default and diamond, didnt try it under any other themes. I remember the * key use to work awhile back on extenders but no such luck still, I'm thinking 2.0.11 worked with * on extenders under the default theme only, I know it worked at some point, whenever the implementation of the * key came into effect of changing between views. I just never used it cause I would set my views and leave them alone, but when it was announced you could hit * to change views, I remember trying it and it worked. Hopefully you guys can figure it out, thanks for this great addition ebr. Sam any ideas on why the * key is not pulling this up on extenders? I see the * type onto the screen, so the 360 sees the button being pressed but no menu.

I have merged this into trunk. There is still some work to do but I wanted to give it a little more exposure and give Neph time to tweak his music plugin how he wants and Throg time to work it into Vanilla 2.0.

Some things still to do:

• Address these buttons on detail screens somehow. Maybe a single button “More Options…” or something that will then bring up another popup? In any case, this can be left up to theme designers. There is a property Application.DetailMenu that will return the options that should be available for the current item.
• Deal with the anomoly with the “*” key going in the typeasyoufind buffer. I have hidden the display but it is still there such that you can’t “back” out of the menu for about 5 seconds after it comes up.
• Any more default actions on items? Maybe Refresh…

i just compiled 1666 and installed and i cant get it to even load MB. when i fire up media center and hit the mb icon i get “The media browser program has stopped responding and you will be returned to Windows Media Center”. I thought maybe it was because i was using vanilla but i changed to diamond and still cant get it to start.

does this work by right click?

heres what my log says when i try to start: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/472290/212200920dc8de74e3549038e490516a385538a.log

looks like there is a conflict with the new multiple entry stuff, which i am not using.

tp – be sure you re-compile the music plugin…

does this work by right click?

bugsie…you and your darned mouse… ;)

Right-click is not currently supported. I can look into it if it doesn’t introduce any other problems.

ebr – how do i re-compile the music plugin?

i tried simply removing it and i still get the same error message

I dunno what to say. Try 1663 and we'll see if we can isolate the problem.

yes, please do look into it! Right clicking would be perfect for this menu.

Should I make a feature request so I can star it.

Right now, right click works to bring up a Media Center menu (I believe). It has “Settings” and “Internet Security” menu items. If it can be replaced with yours that would be excellent.