Overview

The WMC skin has it's roots strongly in Windows Media Center. If allows a smooth transition for those who can not use WMC anymore after changing to Windows 10. Although the visual appearance and feeling is close to WMC, it offers much more features, as there are a menu editor, fanart support and plugins, that make you have a perfect experience.

Home Screen

Home Menu

Start point of the WMC skin is the Home Menu, providing the WMC look and feel. From here you can quickly reach to all screens.

Central point is the focus frame where following is meeting ...

• Vertical Group Menu
  • Indicated by highlighted text colour
  • Sorts the Menu Items into groups, but not selectable
• Horizontal Menu Items
  
  • Indicated by symbol (coloured and large on focus) and highlighted text colour
  • representing the link to screens

Navigation

• By keyboard and remote you can just navigate with your arrow keys through the menus. "Enter"/"OK" selected the Menu Items
• By mouse you can scroll vertically using the mouse wheel and in all directions the navigation buttons, that are visible only on mouse usage

Home Editor

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

You are able to...

• Create new Menu Groups
• Rename Menu Groups / Entries
• Change the order of Menu Groups / Entries
• Add Menu Entries from a list

Installed plugins are automatically recognized. Menu Entries are directly added to Menu Groups or if the plugin is not known added to the list of all available Menu Entries.

Customized Images

A customization of the Menu Item images is possible. In the list of all available Menu Items you can also see the Guid-ID. The available images are stored in "../plugins/WMCSkin/Skin/WMCSkin/images/" in the format

• {Guid-ID}NoFocus.png (unfocused Menu Item)
• {Guid-ID}Focus.png (focused Menu Item)

The image should have a size of 258 x 145 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 Item images can not be recovered when overwritten. Please create a back-up of the original images or you need to reinstall MP2 to restore them.

Menu Group/Entry overview

Home Content

Introduction

Home Content is a feature available since version 2.2 and offering quick and comfortable access to media items and further information in home screen. Make sure your have activated it in Skin Settings, in case it's not showing information.

Navigation

You can navigate between Home Menu and Home Content by pressing the "info" key on remote and "menu" or "i" key on keyboard. With mouse you can directly change the focus by moving the mouse over the respective area.

Note: There is no way to navigate between both areas using "right/left/up/down" keys.

An indicator (slowly blinking "i") shows where you can navigate, if you remain some time on a menu entry.

Focused items within Home Content can mostly be selected. So you can quick access most things directly from Home Screen without entering the media libraries.

Content

The Home Content is changing with the focused Menu Item. An overview of contents offered by the default installer can be found below. Plugins can also offer Home Content.

Definition of content

Skin Settings

The skin settings are a new feature in MP2 to allow more skin specific configuration opportunities. All regular settings are still done in the normal settings menu. You can open the skin settings directly from the Home Menu, there is an own Menu Entry for that.

Available skin settings

• Show background fanarts? (Affects FanArts and running Videos/TV streams in all screens)
• Usage of banners instead of poster in following screens
  
  • Movies (& Movie Collections)
  • Series
  • Seasons
• Show watched flags? (Affects only Grid- and CoverViews)
• Show Info Screen instead of playing media items directly? (Not yet used function, will be implemented later)
• Show Age Certification icon in all media screens
• Enable Home Content
• Layout in GridView: Poster, Banner, Thumbnail
  
  • Movies
  • Series
  • Season

• Define FanArt Visibility dynamically by a value between
  
  • More visibility: 0.7
  • Less visibility: 1.1
• How to show the TV EPG channel list (At least 1 item needs to be selected, in case of no logo the name is always shown as fallback)
  • Channel Number
  • Channel Name
  • Channel Logo

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.