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Overview
This document explains the most important terms and notions defined and used in the MP2 system.
Note: ultimately these terms will be added to the Wiki Glossary and should be linked to the Glossary page wherever they are used.
Player Related Terms
General
Term | Description |
|---|---|
Active player | An active component playing some media item like a song, a video, the current TV signal , ... (my player plays 'R.E.M. - Around The Sun') |
Player | Normally it's the short form for active player, but might also denote the code of a player ('I have installed a new player'). |
Multiple Players
Term | Description |
|---|---|
Current player | The current player is controlled by the remote play controls. It can be switched to the other player. |
Player slot | MP2 provides two player slots which can contain concurrent active players. |
Primary/secondary player | Denote the players in the first or second player slot. If a video is playing, the primary player always shows the background video. If the secondary player also contains a video player, this video is shown as PIP. |
Audio slot (index) | The index of the player which produces the audio signal. Only one of the players will play audio at the same time. |
UI related terms
(Logical) Screen
A (logical) screen is a logical application state in respect to the GUI. A screen presents the current application state to the user. Every screen needs at least one skin file defining its appearance. The term Screen is used to describe a logical view without regard to a specific implementation, a skin file. There are some standard screens defined like home, fullscreenvideo, ..., and there are also new screens defined by skins or plugins, for example tetris-main.
Normally, screen sequences are all rendered in the current skin, but a sequence of screens shown to the user may also be displayed by skin files from different skins, maybe because the current skin doesn't define skin files for some screens to be shown. Then the GUI engine has to fallback to the default skin.
Screens are referenced by
- Other screens (for example when pressing the fullscreen media button, the fullscreenmedia screen will be shown)
- Models (for example a model may show a dialog when it needs user input)
- The Skin Engine (for example when it starts up, it shows the home screen)
Theme
Set of colors, control appearances (styles), control animations, font, font sizes, background image, etc., to be used to render a skin. Every theme can inherit some properties of a parent theme, typically the default theme. Themes may replace the styles in the standard theme completely or just some of them, and/or add new styles and theme resources. Themes define how controls will look like. If you've created websites, think of a theme like the css for a html page.
Skin
Set of files describing the arrangement of controls for every screen. A skin also defines the available screens and parts of the control flow in the application.
Skins define which controls are shown where in every screen. Skins which support themes have to be flexible enough to show controls of different themes, so they must not have hardcoded control positions or colors.
Skins always have to cope with the problem, that multiple suppliers who don't know each other participate in the construction of the skin (i.e. MP main developers and developers of different additional plugins).
There needs to be at least one (standard) skin file for each screen. The MediaPortal 2 system defines default skin files for each standard screen, and every model has to define default skin files for each of its screens.
Skin file
A skin file is a file containing XML/XAML data representing exactly one element (which may be a control or a helper instance instantiated from the XAML data), optionally with sub elements. A skin file may contain the root control to be shown as top element in a window (see definition of "window") or a helper instance (like a ResourceDictionary) which can be included in other skin files by a XAML "Include" element.
A skin file represents either a screen (see screen) or is an include.
Physical Screen
A physical screen is a graphics output device (for fullscreen display setting) or an (OS) window (for windowed display setting). A physical screen has a physical resolution.
Form
A form is the (OS) control to be rendered on a physical screen. It renders one (logical) screen at a time, typically a form runs fullscreen at a specific physical screen. But it is also possible to use MP2 in windowed mode, then you can have multiple forms which can be moved as (OS) windows on the physical screens.
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