The Media Center Sandbox

After submitting a post asking if there was a way to host one application inside Media Center and getting no responses, I am assuming it cannot be done.  I may however be able to accomplish my task by simple setting an alpha blend to the entire Media Center application, so that when you are just looking at it, you see the application running in the background, but pressing any buttons, moving your mouse, etc. would bring up the interface controls for controlling the application in the background, including a button that would just bring the background application to the foreground (for complete interactivity in the application), and then it would just be a matter of adding a new button to the background app to return focuse to Media Center.  Any ideas on how I can accomplish this?

If your top level UI element is a panel, it is transparent (or non-visual anyway).  What you see is the "normal" UI background - the blue background with the swirl on it.  There isn't anyway to have an application that presents a UI as an overlay on the rest of Media Center (although I wish there was).

Cheers,
Andrew

What I'm actually wanting to do is run the Media Center itself as an overlay on top of my other application, though it sounds like that won't be possible either.  Basically, I'd like to integrate my GPS software into Media Center somehow, some way - so that (for example), I can 'hit the green button' to bring up my media library, and still see my GPS directions faded in the background, just as the Video is faded in the background if you are watching television and 'hit the green button'.  Another way to do this would be to pipe the application UI of the GPS software into a video stream, and play that in Media Center - it wouldn't be interactive, but that doesn't matter - it's not like TV is interactive when it is running in the background like that.  Does this make sense?  Do you know of any way to pipe an application like that into a live video stream?   

I am doing something similar.

When my application is called, all semi-transparent UI overlay on <video> element.

The <video> element acts as "take the current video stream and keep playing".

Therefore, my application can "overlay" on video transparently.

You cannot overlay arbitrary UI on top of Windows Media Center features -- a background application can only present a Dialog box. Once the user has launched your application you can create any number of overlay / alpha blended experiences.

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Charlie Owen (Microsoft)

Charlie,

Can we put that in as a feature request for vNext?  If this isn't feasible, it doesn't have to be a full UI overlay even, just a dialog host that can contain a custom UI would be sufficient for most things, using an extended form of the Dialog method.

Regards,
Andrew

You can already do *some* customization to the Dialog (adding your own picture or logo for example -- see http://play.mediacentersandbox.com/sample/5/z/Z-MovieDownload.png.

There are some serious usability implications for arbitrary UI (whether full screen or not). We looked at it pretty closely for Diamond and the usability implications lean towards the negative and solutions to make them less problematic tend to make the feature less valuable for the third party. For example, imagine a world on your Windows desktop where any app could take over any region of your screen at anytime. Oh wait, we don't have to imagine -- I've now got pop up blocker features in IE7. :-) It's just one of the cases where this would not be a good thing -- there are others -- for example, when that UI pops at a critical point in the football game or climax of a show.

Sticking with a tightly constrained dialog is the safest thing -- but if folks want to brainstorm potential solutions we will read them. :-)

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Charlie Owen (Microsoft)

Agree with your thinking - it would really get on my nerves if applications could pop up over TV when I don't want them to, using the web page analogy.   There may be some options to make this user configurable though I suppose (like the ability to remove programs from the Program Library page).

The ability to support custom dialogs within an application (as opposed to over the platform UI) would be good - both the ability to add items to the context menus (as per Nialls suggestion of passing an IList of Command objects in), and the ability to host a UI in a dialog container managed by Media Center would be great - or even the ability to add predefined items, such as checkboxes and progress bars as Media Center can.

Regards,
Andrew

I would simply like to customize the UI within Media Center for custom right-click dialogs ... For example, I am working on a new media management interface in MCML, from which I would like a right-click (hitting the i button on the remote) to bring up a menu with context specific options.  I have gotten that far yet, but I am assuming I will be able to incorporate that by creating my own MCML page for the actual playback - but I'd rather be able to extend the existing playback screens to include my extra options... Is there a way to do that?

Specifically, I want to first of all create a better interface for browsing my CD library - I liked the XP MCE interface better than Vista's... Yes, I know - Vista's is faster, but the tight display is crowded... I'm trying to figure out how to apply a Flip3D-type effect.... Anyway, when a CD, playlist, or genre is selected and played - I'd like to leverage the existing 'Now Playing' screen, which has the nice little background animations, etc. - but with a couple new pieces.  I'd like instant access to a correlated music video, and perhaps even the option of always playing the video instead of the MP3/WMA file... it's an easy enough piece of functionality to add - but if I can't extend the existing screen, then I have to rewrite that entire interface... which isn't so easy to do.

I'm still new to MCML - but does anyone have any ideas to put me on the right path?   

Can't help you, but I REALLY want to be able to add elements to the right-click/i button menus within Media Center and I'm shocked it hasn't been done so far.

I've been wanting to add 'Dance To' to my 'Now Playing' and music lists to make Stepmania start and queue up a music play, as well as an 'Audio Options' to allow you to choose the audio stream when you are playing back an AVI file (or MKV file) with multiple audio streams.

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