Emby friendly Skin

[Everbrave]

@davilla, @amet
Any response to the original topic (Titan skin).
Can we expect this to be ported/added to the skins repertoire since it allows for menu/Home screen customization?

[amet]

@davilla, @amet
Any response to the original topic (Titan skin).
Can we expect this to be ported/added to the skins repertoire since it allows for menu/Home screen customization?

Unlikely that it will be added, 3 skins(Ariana, opacity and Ariana touch) are what we are aiming for.

I have explained the differences before somewhere before, but in short those skins allow us to do the home customisations from core where amber and black glass don’t. Titan would have to be modified heavily to be used as home “compatible” skin and little less as non compatible one...

Keeping “non compatible” skins is a major nightmare and we should have removed them long time ago but we haven’t for the fear of upsetting few(dozens/hundreds) of vocal users.

It’s difficult to please everyone, this forum is the perfect example ( and before someone takes it personally, I am just kidding)

If you would like more technical explanation why it’s a nightmare I would be happy to talk you through it.

I won’t even comment on the rest of this thread, you didn’t want our input on it... right?

[Everbrave]

@davilla, @amet
Any response to the original topic (Titan skin).
Can we expect this to be ported/added to the skins repertoire since it allows for menu/Home screen customization?

Unlikely that it will be added, 3 skins(Ariana, opacity and Ariana touch) are what we are aiming for.

I have explained the differences before somewhere before, but in short those skins allow us to do the home customisations from core where amber and black glass don’t. Titan would have to be modified heavily to be used as home “compatible” skin and little less as non compatible one...

Keeping “non compatible” skins is a major nightmare and we should have removed them long time ago but we haven’t for the fear of upsetting few(dozens/hundreds) of vocal users.

It’s difficult to please everyone, this forum is the perfect example ( and before someone takes it personally, I am just kidding)

If you would like more technical explanation why it’s a nightmare I would be happy to talk you through it.

I won’t even comment on the rest of this thread, you didn’t want our input on it... right?

Thanks for the prompt response
Of course it’s your business decision, but may be you can outsource porting and maintenance of Titan to the original developer; we would be glad to pay more for MrMC and it would attract more new customers.
I can live with Ariana and the wish list is in the forum (from graphical adjustment to filtering); so it will need some effort as well.

As for the rest of the thread, no thanks, I intentionally didn’t want a comment on that, non-constructive and not worthy the time.

Thanks

[amet]

Ariana does need some love, and I would rather focus our efforts on that.

I could be wrong but we did have some conversation going with Titan dev, or someone that wanted to get Titan in... That stopped suddenly for some reason... @davilla might remember it better.

It’s a fine line we are walking here with getting new customers... I’ll try to sum it up in few sentences...

Hard core Kodi(xbmc) fans that wanna use it on Apple TV .... “why do we have to pay for it, what gives you the right to sell it”

Hard core Kodi fans that run into it on Google play store ... “Kodi is free, why should I pay for it? Nothing wrong with MrMC but here is a one star rating”

Hard core Kodi fans that use it on Amazon... “ it’s okay, saves side loading Kodi... I don’t mind paying”

New users that install it on Apple TV and iOS( never seen Kodi before) ... “Ariana is the best, we love it. There is more skins? Who needs it”


Last group is 99% of the user base and as you put it, it’s our businesses decision to make sure they are happy as well as making sure that the first 3 groups are satisfied as well.... you can see that it’s not an easiest balancing act

[Everbrave]

@davilla said once (don’t recall where/when) that Titan was discussed internally.
As for the different groups, I have side-loaded Kodi in my ATV4K (univ. developer account) and I can tell you that the playback quality is far behind MrMC. In addition, you are the guys who made this Kodi version for ATV (I have read this discussion on other forums), so I think it’s legitimate to commercialize it. I can’t judge newer versions of Kodi on Android, but I can compare to other players on ATV4K and MrMC is excellent; it’s my choice; infuse my family’s (because of the UI), Plex client rarely used, Emby client just for testing and Squire also for testing purposes (PlyerXtreme, VLC removed). So, on ATV, the best playback is MrMC but as you said Ariana (UI in general) needs some love.
Again, you know your business market better, but from the forums I read, many would love to adopt MrMC if the UI were better; a hint from my side, the farther, the dissimilar it looks like Kodi the better; if I recall correctly, your team always said MrMC isn’t Kodi, and an own identity is best manifested by the appearance.
We know, there will be no one skin that pleases all (I personally advocated the No Skin, I.e. the one skin approach) but more configuration flexibility is welcome for sure; this could be another line of the development in Ariana, e.g. or Titan
To summarize, I think it would pay-off putting more development effort in the UI.

EDIT: when a user base is saturated, you might want to attract a new user group, how if not with the look, when you have the performance?

[davilla]

UI/Skins are a complicated issue. Everyone has their favorite. Adding to the complication is the tvOS focus engine.
In kodi, there is no concept of focus and true navigation. The kodi core knows left, right, up and down moves. It does not know there any focusable objects, just that a left, right, up and down move was accepted. More hit/test, pass/fail.

MrMC with it's tvOS focus engine handler works very different, it needs to know what objects (view/controls) are focusable to jump one or more (swipes) items. I absolutely hated the Siri remote and used the older AppleTV silver remote before two months of hard coding work resulted in the tvOS focus engine handler. Now, it's the only remote I (and my wife) use with the AppleTV4/4K.

From what I've seen with skins, they are all constructed differently with wildly different layouts that seem to work in kodi but can cause strange things with tvOS focus engine handler. When I run skins other than Opacity and Ariana in focus engine handler debug mode, where control/view bounds are drawn with colors to indicate properties, one wonders how they work at all

And don't forget that tvOS only permits 500k of non-volatile storage and all kodi skins that allow user defined home items or custom configuration do this by writing bits into volatile userdata. I imagine the user experience would be quite poor if all their hard work to customize home/etc vanished again and again.

So we are constrained several ways and cannot just add skins without heavy modification/maintenance.

We have 1) binary pvr sync, 2) GLES -> Metal, 3) tvOS 13 and more on the plate. I'm not sure that pushing back any of these for an Emby Friendly Skin is going to happen time soon.

[Everbrave]

@davilla
Thanks a lot for the explanation; honestly, I now realize more than before that it’s much more difficult than I thought, especially the focus handling. Looking at your plate now makes me think you need more people (to share your food with ), The idea was to outsource the task to the developer of Titan/Embuary at a fair cost, since you will always be absorbed by the core, not only now, your plate will always be full.
In short, probably you need an addition to the team, the question is whether the business can afford it.
MrMC is not a “clock app” and I think you can ask for a higher price, judged by other apps (names can easily be deducted).
Right now, I can see that you can only modify/enhance Ariana and Opacity. We will not ask for more, unless we pay more for you to hire more developers but in the same time, I see that the competition is tough and the market is limited in size, the good thing is “the perfect media player” is not here yet!
Thanks again

P.S. hasn’t the max. app size been increased to 1GB?

[davilla]

The Titan skin dev was working with us at one time, then he just vanished with no explanation or complaints. We have no clue as to what the issue was. Just poof.

Would more developers help, sure. Anyone can start, our source code is public, yet we have seen very little to none interested in adding/fixing code. The best entry into getting 'hired' would be to start doing pull requests. We would not handle pull requests like kodi, and get lost in code style formatting nits and such. Doing pull requests would be a sure fire way to get our attention.

Finding competent developers is hard, MrMC's code base is not like the typical iOS/tvOS app, we are huge.

App size is not an issue.

[Everbrave]

@davilla
I wanted to revive this topic again by hinting to the Bingie skin which is a variation of the Titan skin and I love to use with Kodi, Android TV on Nvidia Shield TV. You might want to get in contact with the developer to bring this skin to tvOS and Android TV.

[borussia]

I would also like to see an emby friendly skin on MrMC, hope there will be some progress soon.

Thanks