Xion Community

This is something i was thinking about, it's not a request, only a mockup from my mind to discuss...

You have a media player, an audio player at this moment, with few features (more to come) but an easy really cool skinning engine (this is the most importat feature atm)...

But you cannot donate all your time to the skinning engine because you have to fix audio problems, playlist problems... and think about implementing madia library, video playback and more and more and more... So probably when the project will grow it will be difficult to mantain every aspect of it, and there is a risk that is falls into the big "media players sea"


At the same time the web is full of full featured media players with playlist, media library, video support... but somehow they lacks a good skinning engine.

So the mockup was... why not leave the creation of a media player to someone else and concentrate on the skinning engine?

Let's take winamp 5, for example, it's full of features and perfectly working, but the skinning engine is heavy, resource hog and difficult to skin (A lot of scripting)...
Modern skinning engine is a plugin (gen_ff)... So Xion could become a skinning plugin and we could obtain a player with winamp features and xion aspect (and lightweight) and skins. Maybe it could become the standard skinning engine. how cool could that be!?

The same could be applied to foobar or vlc.... You have the key, others have the door...

As i said this was a stupid idea i get, but somehow i'd like to discuss with you about it!

So, let's continue your good work!

yea i was thinking kinda the same thing, so i dont believe its a stupid idea/thought
I skin for both so know exactly where your coming from

the roadmap is likely to be changed for Xion but I'll let Cliff fill in on that one

the other thing is that all the main media players all have different interfaces to the way they look to the skinning aspect and then your in with whatever changes are made to those players and then Xion is no longer a standalone app but more of a plugin, thats the biggest thing here, there will still be code needed I believe in a winamp scenario, I'm a maki junki so would still want that aspect of it to work

a fairly decent basic skin can be made straight from the psd in winamp if you use the psdtowal exe util and format your layers in pretty much the same way, the basic xml will be created giving you a pretty much straight forward conversion, the only issue if i remember correctly was a colour issue with the rgb in psdtowal, other than that it does the job

altho that does not come close to the idea of using the Xion skinning engine as a base to plug in to other existing media players, makes you wonder why formats went the way they did, skinning engine in various xml flavas pretty much an easy win for any app is probably why rather than directly going from the psd, also makes more flexible as working from pngs, therefore could do anything quickly rather than have to work through the psd objects

if i'm not wrong sonique2 mantis engine used xml with PSDs layer ID instead of separate PNGs.. that was another win to quick skinning, right?

Not really, Sonique was a bitch and a half to skin (at least for me). It's a good idea, but I personally believe Xion will keep its initial, lightweight framework throughout. The PL isn't skinned (which I love) same with everything else. Winamp Modern can be just as fast and light on its feet if you strip it down to the basics, but once you add any more than just a few buttons it'll bog down which is when Xion comes into play.

Not a stupid idea...but I'm happy with Xion as it is.The only addition I would like to see is the option to put the eq in the skin with an output level(for them crazy eq settings).

I love Xion because I can skinit to match my windowblinds skins and they skin the playlist for me.I dont use any plugins or fancy configs...just play music and look good doing it.Mainly be easy to skin...if I gotta start skinning umpteen zillion options,well,nah,dont have time for that.

Dont care about video...got 4 other players to handle that without bulking up Xions code.(I admit a video window would be ok but not necessary)Zoom player does video better than anything so its my goto for that.If I'm watching video its fullscreen so a matching skin isnt required.

I can create a wmp skin in Skinstudio almost as easy as Xion but its magic pink time so bugger that. (and animations still have to be hand coded I think)

CerebroJD came up with a wmp player skin that automatically grabs the correct windowblinds elements,but its just basic controls...tho it does use perpixel frames...not sure how wmp's skinning engine allowed that.

Till its for money...Xion is the only player to skin for me.(I already skin Windowblinds, Object Dock, DX widgets, wallpapers,icons,bootskins,logons,wmp,progress animations and toolbar icons...Xion got me back into media player skinning.)

mak77 Wrote:Let's take winamp 5, for example, it's full of features and perfectly working, but the skinning engine is heavy, resource hog and difficult to skin (A lot of scripting)...
Modern skinning engine is a plugin (gen_ff)... So Xion could become a skinning plugin and we could obtain a player with winamp features and xion aspect (and lightweight) and skins.

Hi Mak77,

The reason Xion exists, is because I actually don't like Winamp and the other players out there. I wanted to create something that was very fast, lightweight, powerful and supported awesome skins. Hence Xion was born.

I doubt that the reason Winamp is so slow, is because of their Interface code. They have a lot of other things going on under the hood that would be slowing it down.

This can easily be seen with Xion, by unloading the Shimmer Component, which is simply a shell to the core of Xion. Doing so, on a system that experiences no slowdowns while running the skin system, will see almost no difference. Xion is so fast, because I have coded it using no external dependencies. I use pure Win32 api calls and have coded it in light C++ ( as opposed to heavily over engineered classes ).

Are you able to unload the Interface component for Winamp? Does it run faster? I doubt it would give you the performance that you can get out of Xion.

mak77 Wrote:But you cannot donate all your time to the skinning engine because you have to fix audio problems, playlist problems...

Actually I haven't made that many changes to the skinning engine, and I don't foresee massive changes, other than adding Hardware Acceleration. There isn't really much more I need to develop into the skin system that would take vast amounts of time, its more small changes that can easily be juggled along with the other changes.

I really have no desire to make the Xion Interface work for other players as I don't like using the other players. It sounds like a great idea, however since I'm working on this project in my spare time, I'd prefer to be working on something that I myself am going to love using. For me, and a lot of dedicated users, that's Xion in its current form.

I also hope to one day be able to license out the skin engine for others to use, however at the current point in time, I'm not ready to do this.

Feel free to add feature requests and make suggestions, as Xion is only going to get better and more powerful in the future.

Cliff

Cliff Cawley Wrote:I doubt that the reason Winamp is so slow, is because of their Interface code. They have a lot of other things going on under the hood that would be slowing it down.

mainly skinning engine and media library, try by yourself to rename gen_ff.dll so it's not loaded and see the difference... that is because gen_ff is a sort of hack, it's a part of winamp3 loaded in winamp 2, the real winamp 2 window is moved out of screen but still present. winamp3 had to be a cross platform high abstraction player, so the gen_ff code is not so quick and speedy. a quicker engine could do great things.

However i'm happy even if you continue with your work as it is, it's your project

yeah i have to sgree winamps problem i think is that the player tries to do so much. when i found this player i was glad to find a player that simply plaied music lol. i must say about the skinning of the playlist and EQ would be nice maybe a option in the skin menu to apply skins to the playlist and eq? so that people can pick? my main reason i dont like inamp was the main window had so much work done and then when you open anything other then the main player it was set to an un-godly color and to see such hard work in a skin and the other window's that i feel are used often be left in a state that felt "nakid" just kinda made me stop loving winamp. right now im using xion with the aleix which is such a nice skin!! and loosk imsply beautiful along with the black box and cubed! wich are my 3 fav's at the moment. i think its a great idea to somehow make the player be able to work off of windows blinds. that sounds awesome! i dont do any sort of skinning "i wish i i could learn" lol but i must say my biggest concern with xion is keeping this "flair" that at the moment it seems to have. i have already today got 4 friends to download and start using this player. i cant sya how impressed i am with this player. also is there anyway to get a simple how to? or maybe a point in the right direction on how to start forming a skin for this player? if that is even possiable?

looks like you got some more looking round the site to do thers a great big help button at the top of the screen which has tutorials on how to skin

as for window blinds, it will skin all the other windows for you automatically as they are standard windows forms

yeah got to looking mroe and found the skin how toos which i might say are vvery nice. thats for the hint "lol"