Multiple OSDs at the same time?

[Samcek]

I'm trying to implement a kind of "info screen", which would display multiple items at the same time. For instance, I would like to display the current time at the upper right corner, the date at the upper left corner, and current volume and/or movie position at the bottom border. I would like to display all this info at the same time after a singfle remote key press.


All this can be done using OSD plugin, however, there's a problem. To position various bits of information at different locations on the screen, multiple OSDs are needed. I've done that, but it seems Eventghost doesn't want to display more than one OSD at the same time. Whenever a new OSD action is called, the previous (currently displayed) OSD is removed. My question is: why is that and is there anything that could be done to prevent that? Any workaround? Core code change? Or is it impossible because of some fundamental, OS-specific reason?

[Jostein]

I'm trying to implement a kind of "info screen", which would display multiple items at the same time. For instance, I would like to display the current time at the upper right corner, the date at the upper left corner, and current volume and/or movie position at the bottom border. I would like to display all this info at the same time after a singfle remote key press.


All this can be done using OSD plugin, however, there's a problem. To position various bits of information at different locations on the screen, multiple OSDs are needed. I've done that, but it seems Eventghost doesn't want to display more than one OSD at the same time. Whenever a new OSD action is called, the previous (currently displayed) OSD is removed. My question is: why is that and is there anything that could be done to prevent that? Any workaround? Core code change? Or is it impossible because of some fundamental, OS-specific reason?

I know that a workaround could be to just use one OSD. You write the text/code first chose upper left corner. To then have something at the right corner you can seperate with lots of "spaces" and to go down to the bottom you use "enter"

Like:
"Date" "Time"


"Volume"



-Jostein

[stottle]

I think I saw a post a while back that Bitmonster wasn't happy with the OSD plugin and wanted to overhaul it. That never happened. Someone would have to dig into the code to answer your question, and probably a fix would require a rewrite.

I can't think of a technical reason you couldn't have multiple OSD's at the same time (EG can have several dialogs open at once), so your problem is probably the way the plugin is coded. Care to get your hands dirty and take a look?

Brett

[jinxdone]

I think one reason why it has not been rewritten is because it should be made into a graphical / more versatile OSD plugin, which means a lot of work, so Bitmonster (or anybody else for that matter) has not started working on it. Im sure it will be improved at sooner or later though.

[Samcek]

Thanks for all the answers guys. Jostein, your idea is good but unfortunately not suitable for my particular case. The thing is, I would like to have multiple bits of information displayed at the same time stemming from different actions (although all would be triggered by the same button). The time/date info would be generated by some always-on action somewhere in the main EG config branch. The additional pieces of info would be application specific, i.e. when the MPC is playing, another action would query the MPC for the currently playing movie/song title and display that, still another action would query the movie position and display a horizontal bar at the bottom, maybe volume too. If ChrisTV is currently focused application, another action would query ChrisTV for the current channel and display that, still another action would fetch the name of currently playing show from a web page that contains the programming guide for the current channel. In short, I would need several actions doing various processing activities (some of them conditionally activated) and at the end the result should be a seamless blend of all the results displayed at the same time. I can't imagine doing all this the way you suggested, joining the partial results would be really hard in my opinion, not to mention the magic to be done to compose all the text in such a way that various bits of text appear at certain positions on the screen.

I think the EventGhost would profit from having the ability to display multiple OSDs at the same time, this would certainly be a useful solution. That way it would be possible not only to show various bits of status information at the same time, but it would also be possible to use different text styles for different parts (colors, fonts). As for the suggestion to dive in the code and fix it myself, if EG was written in Java I wouldn't bother asking the question but would rather just go on rewriting it, but Python... sorry, not expertise here. And graphic libraries are usually the most complicated parts of any programming platform, it's not like writing the if's and for's which you can learn in ten minutes. I guess I'll have to wait for another hero to tackle this one.