There would be two ways to accomplish this (or more of course). I would very much like to be able to have an addon in xbmc to accomplish this but I would need help from either an xbmc coder or possibly an xbmc skin developper, possibly both. For me to do it myself would probably take a very long time. I'm sure it would be worth it in the end because I would learn lots of cool stuff and come up with other ideas along the way.
The other way is to have a stand alone overlay dedicated to VoxCommando. This would have its pros and cons vs the xbmc addon.
Pros:
- I could do it without help pretty quickly. I've already done something similar as shown in the Kinect demo I posted.
- It would work with multiple programs (any that allowed it to be on top)
- I discussed doing something like this for Kinect and VoxCommando to show commands and to show where your hand was in the Kinect grid. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I'm not sure if it is going to happen or not. If I'm going to do something with the devs of KinEmote it should be in cooperation with them, not a separate fork of KinEmote, otherwise you won't be able to upgrade when they come out with new versions, and I would be forced to keep readapting their code to use my features.
Cons:
- Possible performance hit, and increased resource usage. More memory used since it is it's own process (maybe 20 to 40 megs) but I'd be more concerned about the cost of the video overlay on cpu.
- It would not be possible to integrate it into xbmc skins allowing it to move to make sure it fits with the layout. think of the way the video window moves depending on which menu you are on.
- We would need to hide it when playing video, no? Who wants that on there all the time when you are watching something? This would be easier to do if integrated into xbmc.
- This one I'm not sure about but an application that is always on top could possibly create problems with focus, which can really screw things up. I'm not saying this would be an issue, but it might. I know it is when you try to pop something new up and put it in front.
Perhaps a better solution for your particular memory problem (
) (and mine to be honest) would be if VC offered the option to pop up an osd when you are in standby with a warning, or yellow background or something. So you could see that it recognized the command, but that it was ignoring you on purpose. The downside of this would be if it was recognizing a lot of crap when playing a movie since the popups would get annoying fast.
As usual it's hard to know what is the best solution, since nothing is perfect, and different users will have difference needs and preferences. I always try to think what will benefit the most users, without creating too much complexity, while keeping my work to a minimum if possible.
