Skin engine enhancements (themes, guide colors, skin functions, weather settings...) (2 Viewers)

[powermarcel10]

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

Hi guys,

I have a question.. I like to learn more about making my own skine(files) is there a nice tool for it maybe?

Someone told me about a SkinEditor but I don't know what it is and where I can download it..

I like to mod my skinfiles the way I want it to.. But it's a hard job.. Everytime change one thing, start Mediaportal to see how it looks, and over and over.. I was wondering if there is a better way to do this..

Like a kind of realtime window where you can see what you change..

 

[elliottmc]

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

Unfortunately here in Italy sky uses a lot of generes, at least hundred, and really seems not to be so fixed.

But how many words are common (and unique) to all the 'children's' program genres? Maybe by looking at the possibilities and ensure that we cover the bases with a sub-string searching and a localised file per region/language?

Mark

For documentary channels (for instance) we have

Mondo e Tendenze - Storia
Mondo e Tendenze - Viaggi
Mondo e Tendenze - Scienza
Mondo e Tendenze - Arte e costume
Mondo e Tendenze - Magazine Musica
Mondo e Tendenze - Società
Mondo e Tendenze - Documentari
Mondo e Tendenze - Natura
Mondo e Tendenze - Lifestyle

And similar for other genres, for children for instance:

Ragazzi e Musica - Cartoni Animati
Ragazzi e Musica - Telefilm

As long as we are using a sub-string search, we won't need to list each permutation.

I don't speak any Italian, but it seems that either Mondo (world??) or Tendenze might be common to all documentary genres, Ragazzi for all kids, etc.

Ideally we need to find the one word per language that will always be in the genre EPG data for a particular genre.

This is only ever as good as the EPG data, so we should not obsess over getting it 100%. We should just make it work as well as possible but be as simple as possible.

Mark

 

[robyf]

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

But how many words are common (and unique) to all the 'children's' program genres? Maybe by looking at the possibilities and ensure that we cover the bases with a sub-string searching and a localised file per region/language?

Mark

For documentary channels (for instance) we have

Mondo e Tendenze - Storia
Mondo e Tendenze - Viaggi
Mondo e Tendenze - Scienza
Mondo e Tendenze - Arte e costume
Mondo e Tendenze - Magazine Musica
Mondo e Tendenze - Società
Mondo e Tendenze - Documentari
Mondo e Tendenze - Natura
Mondo e Tendenze - Lifestyle

And similar for other genres, for children for instance:

Ragazzi e Musica - Cartoni Animati
Ragazzi e Musica - Telefilm

As long as we are using a sub-string search, we won't need to list each permutation.

I don't speak any Italian, but it seems that either Mondo (world??) or Tendenze might be common to all documentary genres, Ragazzi for all kids, etc.

Ideally we need to find the one word per language that will always be in the genre EPG data for a particular genre.

This is only ever as good as the EPG data, so we should not obsess over getting it 100%. We should just make it work as well as possible but be as simple as possible.

Mark

But this will lack flexibility... for instance maybe I want only to colour different genres of movies in a different way, not to have documentaries with a colour, children with another and so on.

I think that the solution of looking in tvdb for genres is more flexible.

 

[elliottmc]

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

But this will lack flexibility... for instance maybe I want only to colour different genres of movies in a different way, not to have documentaries with a colour, children with another and so on.

I think that the solution of looking in tvdb for genres is more flexible.

Then in that case you can edit the strings. As long as we have the simplest substrings as the defaults, anyone can change them.

For example, you have a 'Movies' genre, and the default string is

movie;film;

but you want to use 'Kids' for 'kid's movie' and 'Movie' for 'horror movie' - that will work fine.

You just remove the default and add your own. Since it will be a substring search, it will be a substring of whatever you have in there. That is, the EPG genre contains (or actually is) the string in the settings.

Does this make sense?

Mark

 

[tourettes]

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

But this will lack flexibility... for instance maybe I want only to colour different genres of movies in a different way, not to have documentaries with a colour, children with another and so on.

I think that the solution of looking in tvdb for genres is more flexible.

Then in that case you can edit the strings. As long as we have the simplest substrings as the defaults, anyone can change them.

For example, you have a 'Movies' genre, and the default string is

movie;film;

but you want to use 'Kids' for 'kid's movie' and 'Movie' for 'horror movie' - that will work fine.

You just remove the default and add your own. Since it will be a substring search, it will be a substring of whatever you have in there. That is, the EPG genre contains (or actually is) the string in the settings.

Just a note about the implementation - please don't do such huge string comparisions on every single rendering pass. It would be best if the EPG item in DB itself would already know the genre "index" so rendering passes would be much lighter.

So all the processing should be probably done whenever the EPG is being grabbed and the DB content should be refreshed whenever the user modifies the rules.

 

[elliottmc]

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

But this will lack flexibility... for instance maybe I want only to colour different genres of movies in a different way, not to have documentaries with a colour, children with another and so on.

I think that the solution of looking in tvdb for genres is more flexible.

Then in that case you can edit the strings. As long as we have the simplest substrings as the defaults, anyone can change them.

For example, you have a 'Movies' genre, and the default string is

movie;film;

but you want to use 'Kids' for 'kid's movie' and 'Movie' for 'horror movie' - that will work fine.

You just remove the default and add your own. Since it will be a substring search, it will be a substring of whatever you have in there. That is, the EPG genre contains (or actually is) the string in the settings.

Just a note about the implementation - please don't do such huge string comparisions on every single rendering pass. It would be best if the EPG item in DB itself would already know the genre "index" so rendering passes would be much lighter.

So all the processing should be probably done whenever the EPG is being grabbed and the DB content should be refreshed whenever the user modifies the rules.

Would this mean that all genre handling would need to be done on the server rather than on individual clients?

Mark

 

[elliottmc]

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

Hi,

Can I make a suggestion?

The only thing getting any testing here is EPG colouring, and this is not straightforward.

Is it possible to separate this one feature from the other skin engine enhancements, so that people can test those?

My gut feeling at the moment is that EPG colouring won't be ready for 1.3.0alpha, but I'd like to be wrong.

Mark

 

[JacobJust]

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

Why would EPG coloring not be comming in MP1.3 alpha ?

Im running latest build on main HTPC without Any problem.

Sure editing an XML isnt the Best Way to handle genre, but i see no problems in build whatsoever...

Andy: Thanks for youre work on this long awaited feature...

 

[elliottmc]

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

Why is EPG coloring not comming in MP1.3 alpha ?

I never said it was not coming. I said that my gut feeling is that it will not be ready in time. Please can you try to avoid misinterpreting comments in this way. Otherwise before long, a comment such as yours will become a 'fact' even though there is not truth in it whatsoever.

Im running latest build on main HTPC without Any problem.

Sure editing an XML isnt the Best Way to handle genre, but i see no problems in build whatsoever...

Andy: Thanks for youre work on this long awaited feature...

I agree that a massive amount of thanks to Andy for all of his hard work, and I also like what I see so far.

As well as releasing new features, we also have to think about the 'MediaPortal' brand. If we announce that genre colouring is a big new feature for 1.3.0, then it simply has to work well. If it only works for 50% of users out of the box, we will be slated for having failed to deliver this feature. That is why I am trying to make constructive suggestions of how we can get it to work for 99% of the users.

We all want MediaPortal to be the best software. The more successful we are, the more we attact users who simply want it to work with an absolute minimum of configuration. If we spend all our time on the forums helping people get things configured, we have less time to spend on development and testing.

Just my opinion.

Mark

 

[JacobJust]

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

Hi Mark

Thanks for pointing this out. I corrected my words to reflect on you're thoughts.

But delivering a new feature (that doesn't brake anything else off course) to 50% of the users are a pretty good thing to me.

It would be better so have all people using this, but if the EPG coloring is held back because of all signal providers genre mapping issues, there is no way to have this done.

I guess there are as many different genres as there are providers. And some providers are changing these data often.

My personal thought on this is let people handle the genre mapping and if the provider has bad data provisioning, so be it.

Mine provider has poor data and therefor i use XMLTV data. People can use a provider with consistent data if there are issues.

If genres can be read from TVDB and used for mapping to coloring genres then i think that is the solution.

If all genres from all providers needs to be mapped it is a dead end.

Lets focus on the feature itself and if there are any errors in the code done...

My personal thoughts