RE: MVP etc

["Tony Tofts" <tony@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Excellent, thanks Tony. Can't wait...

Hi Jon,

The initial release tries to be similar to the original software with
regards to pictures/movies, with the music side being xplrionet based (i.e.
rio interface).

The work John has done on the graphics rendering, and especially the font
handling, is amazing. Future releases will make better use of the fonts
feature.

The initial release has some missing features, no shoutcast or
text-to-speech at the moment and the web interface only handles the music
side. Obviously future releases will include shoutcast/tts and
videos/movies
on the web interface.

I'm not overly impressed with the way the mvp (this is the same with the
original software) put's the video window in the top left corner rather
than
centering it (hopefully they'll fix this in a future dongle.bin). Also,
I've
found it quite easy to lockup the original software (to be fair it _is_
beta) but hopefully xplrionet won't have the same problem!

Also, it's meant to be an rfb _thin_ client, which means the device
_should_
support partial screen updating to speed up the menu's etc, but it doesn't
(and sniffing the original software bares this out).

For those interested in the technical aspects of the graphics it's quite a
process to render a screen. You have to draw the screen onto a 3 layer rgb
buffer, convert to a single layer and then gzip and send to mvp.

Also, as the mvp is actually off when powered off it's not much use as a
remote control for other devices. We'll probably add an extra option to the
main menu to 'lock' the mvp, and then the remote control presses could be
sent as xpl remote.basic messages for controling lights etc as with the
rio/exstr/slim.

Another feature being considered, though not yet on the to do list, is to
build in a user-definable menu control system for ha use.

Regards
Tony