Part 3
Showtime!
This is a run-through of all the operations you might carry out while relaxing in your
home entertainment center with the media adapter and remote control. Consider this
a dress rehearsal of your own productions.
As you explore your digital
media adapter
, you will find that its screens are organized
in a tree-like structure. These screens are of four kinds:
There is a
home screen
, which is always the first one to appear.
Then there is a
server selection screen
, in case you have more than one
media server.
Next are what we call
category selection screens
, where you choose a type of
content (video, audio, photos, or everything) and you can browse through
categories such as genre, album, artist, date, and any groups you created with
the media server.
Following the category selection screens are the
content selection screens
,
where file names and titles of individual pieces are displayed for you to select
for playback.
(To be completely honest, a screen can be both a category selection screen and a
content selection screen. This will happen if, in the media server’s Media Import
panel, you select both folders and individual files for sharing with the media adapter.
It is normal to do this, and it affects only a few screens.)
The home screen can be thought of as the trunk of the tree, and the individual pieces
as the leaves, with varying numbers of branches in between. A partial map of this
structure can be found at the end of this chapter.
In addition to screens for navigating to audiovisual content and selecting it for
playback, the media adapter provides —
Memory and Bookmark screens for marking and jumping to particular pieces
a Search screen for finding collections and individual pieces by name
a Help screen for finding out what the remote control’s buttons do
a Setup screen for viewing and adjusting media adapter settings
There are also two “screenlets” — boxes that you can display, one only during
playback, and one at almost any time:
a “Go To” box for jumping to any point in a playing video or audio piece
a Status box showing network and (during playback) playback information
Finally, there are playback screens, where videos and still images appear, and where
information is displayed when audio-only content is playing.
It might seem complicated, but in practice it is quite simple. You can often get from
the server selection screen to a playback screen with three or four presses of the
Select
button.