- July 15, 2010
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Scotland
I've been playing around today having a go at making a skin for MP (based upon DefaultWide). Unfortunately I've run into an issue and I don't know whether it's something I've done in the skin or a bug with MP.
Basically I'm getting rendering errors when viewing certain parts of the EPG. For the most part it's fine, but when certain parts of it are displayed or certain programs are selected either all the text disappears completely or certain parts of it disappear (which is usually accompanied by some garbled, distorted text appearing at a random place).
My best guess is that MP is trying to display more text than it can handle. I found one particular entry in the EPG (the Athletics: The London Marathon example as shown in two of the pics) that caused it to partially vanish/garble, and it had a rather long description, so I tried manually shortening the description and the problem went away. I then reinstated the old description and the problem returned. Neither version of the description had any exotic characters (all were standard English letters, numbers and punctuation).
Now, you may be wondering why a skin would cause there to be more text than usual on the screen. Well, I'm designing the skin specifically for those who use MP on 16:10 desktop monitors, and so have made the text smaller and rearranged it in such a way that the EPG shows 14 channels at once rather than the standard 10.
I have also tried this with multiple fonts, including the standard ones and the same issue applies, but it doesn't apply when I switch back to DefaultWide. Other than the aspect ratio, font used, the positions/sizes of some objects and the addition of the "NoShadow" style to some objects (I have also tried it without these - there is no observable difference), nothing else is changed in the skin. Currently the skin only modifies the EPG page.
I have checked in the MP logs and there are no entries that coincide with the errors.
I have attached some images which should clarify how the error manifests, as well as one where the error is not manifesting. If it matters, these images have been scaled down to 1280×800 from their native res of 1920×1200.
My hardware/software details are in my profile. My graphics card drivers are the AMD catalyst drivers version 8.950.0.0.
UPDATE: I just tried making the EPG grid fill the whole screen, and the issue manifest far more frequently, which would seem to support my "too many characters" hypothesis.
Basically I'm getting rendering errors when viewing certain parts of the EPG. For the most part it's fine, but when certain parts of it are displayed or certain programs are selected either all the text disappears completely or certain parts of it disappear (which is usually accompanied by some garbled, distorted text appearing at a random place).
My best guess is that MP is trying to display more text than it can handle. I found one particular entry in the EPG (the Athletics: The London Marathon example as shown in two of the pics) that caused it to partially vanish/garble, and it had a rather long description, so I tried manually shortening the description and the problem went away. I then reinstated the old description and the problem returned. Neither version of the description had any exotic characters (all were standard English letters, numbers and punctuation).
Now, you may be wondering why a skin would cause there to be more text than usual on the screen. Well, I'm designing the skin specifically for those who use MP on 16:10 desktop monitors, and so have made the text smaller and rearranged it in such a way that the EPG shows 14 channels at once rather than the standard 10.
I have also tried this with multiple fonts, including the standard ones and the same issue applies, but it doesn't apply when I switch back to DefaultWide. Other than the aspect ratio, font used, the positions/sizes of some objects and the addition of the "NoShadow" style to some objects (I have also tried it without these - there is no observable difference), nothing else is changed in the skin. Currently the skin only modifies the EPG page.
I have checked in the MP logs and there are no entries that coincide with the errors.
I have attached some images which should clarify how the error manifests, as well as one where the error is not manifesting. If it matters, these images have been scaled down to 1280×800 from their native res of 1920×1200.
My hardware/software details are in my profile. My graphics card drivers are the AMD catalyst drivers version 8.950.0.0.
UPDATE: I just tried making the EPG grid fill the whole screen, and the issue manifest far more frequently, which would seem to support my "too many characters" hypothesis.
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