[mythtv] New UI control

[Josh Stewart]

> And I totally agree with Stuart, that flash and Clutter won't be
> easily theamable.
>
> Best Regards,
> Ahmed Toulan.
>
> On Dec 12, 2007 8:56 PM, Stuart Morgan <stuart at tase.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 December 2007 17:52:44 Andrei Tanas wrote:
> > > Yes it can but where I work, they tried to create an interface for a
> > > device based on it and they had a lot of problems like the flash plugin
> > > consuming lots of CPU (something related to timers IIRC), difficult to
> > > receive feedback from the running processes, etc
> > >
> > > > http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/
> > > > http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
> > >
> > > The gnash plugin worked much better but lacked a few necessary things
> > > (I
> > > can't tell which ones exactly as I wasn't involved). In the end they
> > > choose to use clutter. http://www.clutter-project.org/
> >
> > Sure it doesn't have to be Flash (although, there's probably a lot more
> > designers who know it than everything else combined), it can be Clutter or
> > MS Silverlight for all I know, I just think that it's not a very good idea
> > to implement "UI control" from scratch when these things already exist.
>
> MythUI has mostly been written, it's very good at what it does and when
> mythfrontend is ported over to use it, you'll start to see some very cool
> themes/UIs as a result.
>
> Neither Flash nor Clutter would be easily themable, they rely on
> pre-determined animations and effects. MythUI allows the themer to devise
> their own graphics, layouts, animations and effects in simple XML. MythUI is
> also easily extended, the same can't be said for the other two.
> --
> Stuart Morgan

I've been lurking on this list a little while and thought this was as
good a chance as any to contribute something. A few months back I
started work on a bit of a toy project of creating a Myth frontend
using Clutter and I can confirm that the theming side of things doing
it this way is fairly limited (without making the theme mechanism
fairly complex)
(I want to stress that this is not in any way meant to detract from
the existing frontend as I think MythUI will do fantastic things when
fully used, but I just kept seeing people complaining about how dated
the frontend looked and others responding with 'Don't like it, fix it'
comments.)

The app I've written uses python and Clutter with gstreamer doing all
the media work (Doing it this way allows for the future possibility of
it being easily multi-platform). It currently has very basic media
playback capabilities and can connect to a Myth backend and stream
video, albeit with issues at the moment.
If anyone wants to check it out there's an (old) screencast at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt_7eiZaBRM or the projects site is
http://code.google.com/p/gloss-mc/.

Like I said, I don't want to detract from the existing frontend, I
just thought some people might be interested.

-Josh