Sub Menu

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SubMenu is a main menu replacement plugin. It provides most of the functionality from the original NPVR menu system, and adds:

the ability to group items into sub menus
the ability to give any menu item a custom name
the ability to use custom background images for each menu entry

Please note that it currently only supports the horizontal menu type.

Downloading and Installing

Download: SubMenu.zip (35 KB, 1877 downloads)

To install, simply extract the zip's contents into NextPVR's Data Directory.

(For NPVR 2.6, you must use SubMenu-NPVR2.zip instead)

Activation

To become the active menu, SubMenu attempts to perform the following operations when you enable it. Firstly, it renames Horizontal.xml and Vertical.xml (both found in Skin\<SkinName>\Menu\) to Horizonal.submenu and Vertical.submenu. It then adds <MenuType>SubMenu</MenuType> to Skin\<SkinName>\Global.xml.

Configuration

Menu Entries

Upon first run the plugin will duplicate your existing main menu settings from config.xml, writing them to <PluginSettings><SubMenu> (in its own style). You can then edit to get the menu structure you want. For example:

  <SubMenu>
    <MenuLayout>
      <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="EPG">TV Guide</MenuItem>
      <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="Live TV">Live TV</MenuItem>
      <Menu name="Other">
        <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="Music">Music</MenuItem>
        <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="Videos">Videos</MenuItem>
        <Menu name="More">
          <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="DVD">DVD</MenuItem>
        </Menu>
        <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="Pictures">Pictures</MenuItem>
      </Menu>
      <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="Custom" exe="C:\runme.exe" args="-args">Custom</MenuItem>
    </MenuLayout>
  </SubMenu>

Rename a plugin using the "displayName" attribute, but make sure the element text itself has the correct name (as in the TV Guide example above).

If you want to include a "Back" menu item to allow you to select/click a button to move up a menu level, then simply include the following type of entry:

  <Menu name="MySubMenu">
    <MenuItem enabled="true" displayName="Back">Back</MenuItem>
  </Menu>

Newly installed plugins will be detected and added to the root menu automatically. You can then edit the config file to rename, move, or disable their entry.

Custom Images

SubMenu will look for background JPEG images in its SubMenu skin folder (eg Skin\Default\SubMenu). Any images must be given the same name as the actual MenuItem entries rather than their custom names. For example, "Live TV.jpg" or "Videos.jpg".

You can download a set of background images created by Mattyb3806: SubMenu-Backgrounds1.zip (4.98 MB, 759 downloads)

Un-installation

To uninstall the plugin, first disable it by using NPVR Settings. You can then remove the Plugins\SubMenu and Skin\Default\SubMenu folders. If you want to fully remove all traces of the plugin, then you can also delete the entries it will have added to config.xml, under the section <PluginSettings><SubMenu>.

Support

For help, discussion, or reporting any issues with this plugin, please use the 3rd Party Plugins area of the NextPVR forum.

Source Code

SubMenu was developed from the code in AeonLike.cs, originally released by sub in this thread. The source code for SubMenu is available on request by sending a PM to imilne.