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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ajp8164" data-source="post: 832136" data-attributes="member: 64375">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:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Auto-mapping based on regexp matches</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Auto-mapping based on previously mapped names (fuzzy logic mapping)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Edit mapping/colors from the skin?</li> </ul>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</blockquote>

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