Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings...) (1 Viewer)

[mironicus]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

The startup of your Mediaportal-version takes longer than a normal built - it takes as long as a new installed version every time it is started again. I see the "Caching graphics" status for a few seconds every time I start your version. Is this normal or a bug?

 

[robyf]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

The startup of your Mediaportal-version takes longer than a normal built - it takes as long as a new installed version every time it is started again. I see the "Caching graphics" status for a few seconds every time I start your version. Is this normal or a bug?

I've also seen this... I do not think it takes the same time as a newly installed version, but at least displays the "caching graphics" message even if the skin is already cached.

 

[elliottmc]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

Hi,

With the latest build, I can no longer reproduce the issue with the problem string. All seems to be working as it should.

However, since we have hard-coded strings for genres in TsWriter, we need to be certain that these are all included in the xml for genres.

So, EPG colours working fine. What else needs testing?

Mark

 

[ajp8164]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

The startup of your Mediaportal-version takes longer than a normal built - it takes as long as a new installed version every time it is started again. I see the "Caching graphics" status for a few seconds every time I start your version. Is this normal or a bug?

I've also seen this... I do not think it takes the same time as a newly installed version, but at least displays the "caching graphics" message even if the skin is already cached.

Thanks guys - I'll look into this. I did make some changes to TextureManager (caches the textures) to support themes - I could have broken the cache mechanism - I'll report back..

 

[ajp8164]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

I'm sorry but I dont have a DVB T card yet. I can take a look into
data from epggrabbers like tvinfo.de or tvtoday.de but does that help?
MP doesnt offer all possible tv logos for every channel so I think the configuration should
be up to the community. Someone (maybe me) will create and maintain a working set for a epg source.

I finished analysis of tvinfo.de and tvtoday.de grabber data and turns out that tvinfo.de xml file does not contain any genre information.
That means no category tag at all .. tvtoday uses a wide variation of categorys like clickfinder so there should be a wordlist for that.
I managed to find out that tvinfo has genre information on their site as a div class pGenre. Maybe the grabber needs to be updated for that.
If thats the case tvinfo.de has also a wide but different wording for genres as clickfinder or tvtoday. Would be hard to put them all toghether.

EDIT:
BTW, the HD icon is part of your mod if avalon isn't it? Would it be possible to also add a dolby icon? Do I need a modified MP installation or is this possible with regular 1.2.2 version?

The HD icon thing is built into MP, not part of Avalon. I think it's in 1.2.2. Do this to check:

• Add an imaged named hd_program_icon.png to your skin media folder.
• Edit MediaPortal.xml to add to the "mytv" section and entry named "hdtvProgramText" and enter the text "Dolby" as the value. I use the text "(HDTV)" but it cold be anything.

If this works ok I can create a feature to make this more general (any program decoration) and with a regex match so that we can show multiple icons at the same time. To show multiple icons we'd just have to create a dolby icon, an hd icon, and a dolby-hd-combined icon (single image). Could even expand to include genre icons too ;-) Easy to do..

 

[ajp8164]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

Hi all,

Perhaps we need a different thread for this whole tv program genre discussion.. we can move these entries later if we need to.

I recognize that every guide provider will likely have their own list of genres. I know that there are some standards around but still we will have to assume that the list of genres for tv from your guide provider is vastly different than mine. Even more, that the guide genres from any single provider will change over time. To be able to put together a good implementation my approach is not to collect a list of genres from every provider and make a gigantic map that everyone can use (that would require us maintaining the list which is not what I think we should do). Rather, I propose (and what I have partially implemented) that the implementation simply grab the list of program genres that are in your tv database right now and make them available to MP so that they may be mapped to "MP genre names". In this type of implementation, each time the tv database is updated with new genre names they are made available to the MP configuration for subsequent mapping. Even if you switch guide providers everything should still work as you would expect (goal is with minimal, if any, reconfiguration or settings update).

So, "MP genre names". I realized early on that the you really can only deal with 5+- colors on the tv guide. Adding more than 5+- the renders the guide unreadable. You really only need a few genres to point out shows that might be of interest to you (like movie, sports, kids, news - that's it). Problem is that we should not dictate this set of genres (or the colors, imo). So, I create the idea of an "MP genre name" that is made up by us (initially), but is customizable by the end user. A list of 5+- names that should be mapped to by the guide provider genre names (of which there could be hundreds). The purpose of the genre map and the genre color map is to provide the basis for a solution. However, up until now I have not had a front end to allow for configuration - you had to edit the xml by hand. I have created a configuration tool update that adds end user setup for genre mapping and genre colors mapping. The attached screen shots show this initial implementation (which I have not yet committed). It works great but still needs improvements. I'd like your feedback to the concept for the configuration tool screens before I commit... (do you think I should commit in this FEAT branch or create a new branch?)

Areas for improvement include:

• Auto-mapping based on regexp matches
• Auto-mapping based on previously mapped names (fuzzy logic mapping)
• Edit mapping/colors from the skin?

BTW - the "Color options" tab is used to configure something that is really a by-product of the whole capability to colorize programs for genre. To be able to colorize the images used (form the media folder) need to be compatible with color blending operations in the graphics pipeline (this is where the colors are applied - it's fast ;-) So, the "Color options" tag allows you to set guide colors that you like but when genre's are not being colored. This overrides the legacy use of tv guide program button images. When genre coloring is enabled, the programs that are not colored by genre are colored by these values on the "Color options" screen.

Final note: the skin developer must make changes to their skin to be able to use any of this guide coloring capability - if they don't then the legacy guide is rendered -- this *is* a backward compatible implementation :-D

 

[elliottmc]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

I'd like your feedback to the concept for the configuration tool screens before I commit... (do you think I should commit in this FEAT branch or create a new branch?)

It only really makes sense for this branch, so I don't see any need for a new branch.

It looks good so far, but I would say that I need to play around with it first.

Just a couple of comments.

1. The strings hard coded in TsWriter need to be in there for genres. They are absolutes.

2. The skin should really define the colours for the genres, since what looks good will depend on the colour used in the skin. However, it is good to have an over-ride mechanism.

3. I think we need to keep it simple. If we allow 20 genres (for example), no-one will use this since the EPG will just be a rainbow of colour. I think we need to keep it to the default small number of genres, but allow custom strings to be added for each, so that the colours are properly presented.

I would say that allowing easy and intuitive customisation of the genres is the first priority, ahead of colour customisation.

The best way for a user to configure the genres (in my opinion) is

1. Go to EPG. Right-click to bring up context menu.

2. Go to "configure genres" option. Select "add this genre"

3. Select the 'category' you want to add it to.

This then applies the new genres immediately.

Of course, as we always do, allowing this to be done from configuration.exe might be quicker but it won't allow access to the EPG.

Mark

 

[robyf]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

I think the approach of reading the genres from the DB and map it to MP genre names is the correct one, apart from having the ones in tswriter present as default.

The idea of Mark that you can map genres into MP is great, but I think that also an interface in configuration.exe is necessary to make the first configuration, doing it all in MP will probably be unfriendly.

 

[elliottmc]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

I think the approach of reading the genres from the DB and map it to MP genre names is the correct one, apart from having the ones in tswriter present as default.

The idea of Mark that you can map genres into MP is great, but I think that also an interface in configuration.exe is necessary to make the first configuration, doing it all in MP will probably be unfriendly.

Well, the advantage of doing it within MP is that the user doesn't need to load up MP, check the genre, type it into config, etc. Possibly the genre string is truncated in the UI, depending on the skin.

I don't know whether it would be possible to add something to TV server setup to export all possible genres to a file that configuration.exe can read for this purpose. Maybe the TV plugin could have a context menu item in the EPG to save all genre strings? It is a matter of having access to the list of genres in the user's EPG, and only the TV server and TV plugin will have access to this information.

Mark

 

[tourettes]

Re: Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings.

TV server should collect all the genres all the time in addition to the DVB spec's defaults. It is not ok just to dump the current state as it would be changing all the time and user would have to grab EPG multiple times to get majority of the genres. Initial setup wont ever be nice... it will be good only for the DVB sourced EPG that has static list.

Genre colouring in a heterogenous EPG environment with dynamicly changing content is really hard feature to create properly / user friendly. Maybe the 1st instance should be just DVB EPG that is static and then extended later on to cover the dynamic genre sources like webepg. I cannot imagine user to spend one month timespan to catch all the possible genre types from a EPG stream... and even month wouldn't be enough in some cases.