Overview

Nereus skin is the default skin of MediaPortal2 and combines the latest functionalities with a cool design, which is not overloading your screen. The color setting combines dark colors with turquoise focuses and slight shin effects. It offers an advanced menu editor and many customization options to set-up your own media portal experience.

Home Screen

Home Menu

Start point of Nereus is the Home Screen, with a vertical Home Menu containing the menu tiles. Focused menu tiles are slightly zoomed, brigther and have a white indicator on the left side. If activated in settings Help Texts are shown in the bottom for the focused menu tile.

Selecting (Remote: Ok, Mouse: Left click, keyborad: Enter) a menu tile navigates you directly into the corresponding library view. Scrolling through the menus with a mouse wheel is possible.

The home menu dynamically slides out, if the focus dropped to other elements, or slides in, if navigating to the left (or moving the mouse to the left screen edge).

Top Menu

The Top Menu provides quick access to ...

• Power Menu (Shutdown, sleep, hibernate, ...)
• Settings
• Browse through file system
• User (if activated in settings, shows the logged user and opens the user dialog when selected)

Home Content

Introduction

Home Content is a feature offering quick and comfortable access to media items and further information in home screen. It can be configured an deactivated in home editor. The home content is changing with the focused home menu tile and slides horizontally in and out. The media information of focussed contents are visible in the bottom left as for the help texts.

Quick Shortcuts

Quick Shortcuts can consist of different tile types:

• Sub-Menu tiles related to superier menu tile (e.g. TV-Guide, schedules or recordings for TV)
• Filter shortcut tiles for the related library (e.g. genre filter view for movies without the need to enter the library and filtering for genres from the side menu then)
• Options for the related home menu tile

Content

An overview of contents offered by the default installer can be found below. Some plugins can also provide home content.

Definition of content

Home Editor

Functionality

The menu editor is a feature, that allows you to fully configure the home menu structure according to your needs. It can be opened directly from Home Menu by

• Mouse: "right click" on home menu tile
• Remote: "info" button while focus on homemenu tile
• Keyboard "context-menu" key while focus on home menu tile

You are able to...

• Arrow icons: Change the order of home menu tiles
• X icon: Remove and add home menu tiles out of a list of available entries
• Gear icon: Configure the home content (option not always available, see table)

Installed plugins are automatically recognized. Menu entries are directly added to home menu or if the plugin is not known added to the list of all available menu entries. All available menu entries, not placed in home menu, are always placed into the "others" section, which can not be removed with the menu editor.

Customized Images

A customization of home menu tile images is possible. The available images are stored in "..\plugins\Nereus\Skin\Nereus\images\HomeMenu\" in the format

• {Guid-ID}.png

The image should have a size of 400 x 400 pixel or at least the same aspect ratio. For performance reasons due to rescaling higher resolutions are not recommended. Please be aware, that existing menu tile images can not be recovered when overwritten. Please create a back-up of the original images or you need to reinstall MediaPortal 2 to restore them.

Skin Settings

The skin settings allow more skin specific configuration opportunities. They can be found in settings under appearance.

Available skin settings

• Show background video (Enable background videos as deplacement of default FanArt backgrounds)
• Enable help texts (Whether to display help texts for focused menu entries in home screen)
• Show fanart (Weather to display FanArt backgrounds, disabled also video backgrounds are not visible)
• Enable grid details (Whether to show right sided media item details for grid views. when disabled simplified details are shown in the bottom)
• Enable cover details (Whether  to show media item details in cover views)
• Define fanart visibility dynamically by a value between
  
  • More visibility: 0.7
  • Less visibility: 1.1
• Enable loop scrolling (Whether to use loop scrolling in media lists, set the paramters like scroll delay and scroll speed)
• Enable auto scrolling (Wheather to use auto scrolling instead of manual scrolling in scroll views)
• Enable watched flags (Wheather to display watched icons in selected views)
• Show age certification logos in all media screens (with extended details)
• Layout in grid view: Poster, banner, thumbnail
  
  • Movies
  • Series
  • Season

Media Screens

All screens showing content related to media Items are called Media Screens. This can be videos, audio files, games, ... The arrangement of Media Screens depends on the View Mode

Screen composition

Coverview and Gridview

• Top Menu with all possible actions
• Content area with the posters of media items (Horizontal scrolling)
• Details area (Footer) showing more information of the focused MediaItem

Listview

• Slide Menu with all possible actions (Same content as TopMenu), but not visible and slides out when navigating "right".
• Content area (Left screen half) with the list of media items (Vertical scrolling)
• Details area (Right screen half) showing more information of the focused MediaItem

Top and Slide Menu

Top Menu

The Top Menu is a new feature that WMC users know well. All possible actions are always visible on top of the screen, even when navigating through the content area. The items of the Top Menu consist of an icon and description text for very quick and intuitive navigation. When focused, the icon is surrounded by a focus frame and the description text is highlighted. There can be more Top Menu items that visible, you may be able to scroll in the TopMenu, if items have a transparent fade-out.

Slide Menu

The Slide Menu offers the same content as the Top Menu, but is in normal condition invisible, just the arrow indicates, where it is located and in which direction it will slide out (see screen shots).

• To open the Slide Menu navigate in the opposite direction of the arrow.
• To close it navigate in arrow direction.

Content area

The Content Area is displaying the list of media items or further content.

View Modes

It can be shown in different View Modes. For the included media libraries the View Mode can be changed as follows

List View

• Small(Only text, no poster shown in list)
  
  
  
• Medium (Small poster shown in list)
  
  
  
• Large (Large poster shown in list)
  

Grid View

Poster are available in all Grid Views. For movies, series and seasons there is the possibility to switch to Banner or Thumbnails in Skin Settings.

• Poster
  
  
  
• Banner
  
  
  
• Thumbnails
  
  
  

Coverflow View

• Default
  

Details Area

t.b.d.

Indicators

In the content area are different types of indicators depending on the View Mode. Since MP 2.1 media Item parents know the status of their children, means a series knows about their seasons, which know about their episodes. If a season consists of 10 episodes it is watched, when all episodes are watched. If 1 - 9 episodes are watched, the season is partly watched.

These are the main relations:

• Episode → Season → Series
• Movie → Movie Collection
• Audio Item → Audio Album

Percentage Played

The Percentage Played indicator showes how much of a media Item is watched. It is indicated in the details area with a circular bar and percentage value. Media items can be always resumed from the last position when selected.

Remark: Please be aware, that the Percentage Played value is not resetted, when manually setting a media item to unwatched

Watched

The watched indicator is available for movies, movie collections, series, seasons, episodes and videos. Is is showing, when a media item was completely watched. This is the case, if at least 90% of the media item were watched. It can be also set menualy by context menu to watched or vice versa back to unwatched.

• Grid and Coverflow View (Can be deactivated in Skin Settings)
  
• List View
  

Partly Watched

The partly watched indicator is available for the same media items as the watched indicator. A media item is partly watched, if the percentage played status is between 10% and 90%.

• Grid and Coverflow View (Can be deactivated in Skin Settings)
  
• List View
  

Virtual Media Items

Virtual Media Items are physically not available, but all media descriptions and Fanarts are handled as for regular media items. Virtual Media Items can be missing episodes of a series or missing movies of a movie collection. You can can show and hide Virtual Media Items in the media settings. When shown following indicators help you to distinguish between regular media items.

• Grid and Coverflow View ("X"-flag)
  
• List View (Grey font color)
  

Recording

The Recording Indicator appears in the upper left corner when the tuner is recording a TV-channel. It is slowly flashing until the recording is finished.

Importing

The Importing Indicator appears in the upper left corner during an import of new media items. This can be triggered by a manual import or automatically, if the Share-Watcher is activator. For last option the import takes place automatically, whenever an media item i added. The importing indicator shows also the percentage progress of the total import, considering, that several imports (E.g. movies and audio) can occur concurrently.

TV

TV Guide Genre Colors

You can activate TV genre colors in TV settings and assign predefined colors to TV genres.

To map the TV genres with existing genres from your EPG provider, use the TV-Setup.

Select a TV genre (E.g. Documentary in screen shot) and map all fitting EPG genres from the bottom list b using the "<<" key.