TV Guide Genre Colours

[Marcusb]

Excellent FlipGer, this is something I am very interested in too.

Cheers,

Marcus.

[FlipGer]

Hi,

Ok, i have added the patch on sourceforge

This is only a small hack to define your own genre colors in the TVGuide. This happens through an externel XML for each skin.

If no XML is defined, the normal colors will be taken.

I have added an example GenreColors.xml. This file has to placed in the \skin\<name>\ directory. Eg. \skin\BlueTwo\GenreColors.xml

Colors can be added by name "Red"
or by HEX #RRGGBB and #AARRGGBB
#FF0000 (red)
#00FF0000 (red with alpha value 0)

You can define up to 30 colors. The "info"->"count" is optional. It might speed up the process of reading for some milliseconds. ;-)

There is no real connetion between a genre and the color, this can not be done easily. This is because the genre names are read dynamically by MP out of the tvguide.xml. So the colors are randomly added to genres by MP.

But hopefully this will help some skinners to make there TVGuides looking even nicer. :-)

Flip.

[Hammer9600]

Beautiful

[Taipan]

Thanks very much FlipGer.....

How can I tell when the patch has been applied to a CVS?

[FlipGer]

Hi Taipan,

i usally take a look into the sourcecode once a day to check if the changes have been implemented. So i will let you know.

You can see it, if the new file GenreColors.xml will appear in the /skin/<name>/ directory.

"Unfortunately" some changes have been done to the sourcefiles, so i uploaded a new version today. Hopefully it will find its way into CVS.

Flip

[frodo]

Sorry but it wont. The patch is not that user friendly
for example:

XML :
- users have to add <color1> to <color30> in the .xml file
- user have to fill in the count in the .xml file
Not very userfriendly. Loose the count/numbers pls

Mapping:
no mapping is possible between genre name & color. This patch only allows you to assign different colors.
I would like to have a genre<->color mapping instead

If you fix these 3 things i'll put it in cvs

[FlipGer]

Hi frodo,

Originally Posted by frodo

Sorry but it wont. The patch is not that user friendly
for example:
XML :
- users have to add <color1> to <color30> in the .xml file
- user have to fill in the count in the .xml file
Not very userfriendly. Loose the count/numbers pls

Jep, will try to do that.

Originally Posted by frodo

no mapping is possible between genre name & color. This patch only allows you to assign different colors.
I would like to have a genre<->color mapping instead

Jep, this is imho the worst thing and i would also like to see that, but this can not be done easliy. MP builds its genres dynamically out of the tvguide.xml. So every user has individual genre types, because of:
a) different languages
b) different grabbers

I for example have nearly 1000 genres! Because i am using the german Clickfinder for my tvguide.xml.

So, in my eyes there are only two ways to "fix" this:
1) Let the user assign colors to the genres.
Result: No influence for the skinners. Need of an additional user interface.
2) Hardcode say about 30 genres in english language.
Result: Influence for skinners. No need to import the genres from tvguide.xml anymore. Need of translation in strings.xml.

So both solutions are not very satisfying and need much code changes. Therefor i only did a fast hack. I would tend to the second one, but that is beyond my freetime...

I can change the first two points, but the third....

BTW: Is there an easy way to walk trough an xml with the xmlreader? Something like foreach node? Haven't found it yet. But will search for it.

Thanks for looking into it anyway!

Flip

[James]

Hi FilpGer,

I would say define a number of genre groups or catagories. 30 seems like too many. Too many colours will make a mess of the EPG in my option. I would say limit it to 5 or 10 at the most.

Then name them in the strings files. Apply colours to them in the skin. For example Movie, News, Sports, ...

Then have a user configurable system for mapping/translating the EPG genres to these groups.

So the 1000 genres that you have are most likely Movie/Drama, Movie/Comedy, etc .. these cann all be mapped to Movie.

The original genre can still be kept, but the mapping would be just for the colour selection.

/James

[LordMessi]

My suggestion would be a 2 new fields in the genre table:

MPColor and WebColor
Both strings

Then the user could set a genre color to use in MP and one to use on the web (ie. MPW)

???

[FlipGer]

Hi James,

yes, this was also more or less my idea. Thanks for the hints.

Again, this is much to change, and i dunno if i can find the time...But i will try.

Flip