Feature suggestion: awesome eye candy / visual effects

[ahawks]

First let me say, I know it's probably unrealistic, but it's something I've always thought would be cool.

I would like to see the user interface enhanced with dynamic, hardware accelerated animations. I know BeyondTV can already use acceleration for displaying video, so I figure it's partly there already.

I'm not envisioning anything over the top. Just some simple, subtle effects like instead of the nice blue background with wavey/curvey shapes, have it dynamically generate those moving around a little. A lot like visualizers are done in winamp/itunes/etc.

Other nice touches would be menus sliding on/off screen, or fading, etc.

No other HTPC software out there does anything like this. If BTV got there first, it'd be some good publicity. Sort of like how Macs got a good bit of attention when OSX started supporting accelerated rendering... and how XGL/Compiz is making waves in the Linux community for GL accelerated stuff.

[merrypig]

Ah. that brings back memories. At one point BTV did in fact have some animations and all sorts. We cried foul so loudly they ran hither with tail between the legs.

Impressive they were ... the first time. Then just damn annoying.
I've thankfully blotted them out so I can't recall what they actually were now though... handy that