Skinning the EPG / render order? (1 Viewer)

[Rob Hexenmeister]

Evening all,

I am having a little bit of bother skinning the EPG. The specific issue is the border highlight. It shows on all the items except those selected for recording. I was wondering if that is because the red colouring of the programme scheduled for recording is rendered over the top of the highlight?

This is quite helpful on skinning the EPG:

Skin TV Guide

The MediaPortal TV Guide may be customized in a number of ways including the following:

www.team-mediaportal.com

What it lacks is recommended dimensions, and transparent/masked areas of the .png graphics

Can anyone help on this?

Many thanks
RH

 

[catavolt]

Best reference is DefaultWideHD and ofc PureVisionHD, but Titan should do as well

 

[CyberSimian]

The specific issue is the border highlight. It shows on all the items except those selected for recording.

This works correctly for me. The first screenshot below shows the border highlight for a programme that is currently recording, and the second screenshot shows the border highlight for a programme scheduled to record in the future:



Strangely, this all seems to happen without defining anything specific to the border highlight. The only odd aspect that I noticed is the texture (image) that is used for the border highlight, namely
tvguide_highlight_border.png. This is a 1x1 single-pixel image. It is not a frame. This suggests to me that internally the skin engine is using the support for borders.

Very few skins use borders, because mostly borders do not work correctly. However, there is one combination of settings that does work correctly, and that is when the image used to fill the border frame is a single pixel. In this case, the skin engine simply repeats the single pixel horizontally and vertically as many times as necessary to fill the border frame. This gives the border frame the important property that the thickness of the frame remains constant as the frame is resized to fit different shapes and/or different sizes (this is exactly the behaviour that you want for the EPG, where the width of the EPG grid cell varies according to the duration of the programme).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Rob Hexenmeister]

Best reference is DefaultWideHD and ofc PureVisionHD, but Titan should do as well

Thank you Catavolt - actually I have been looking at Titan. Also DefaultWide (but not HD as my theme is built on top of DefaultWide)

It's baffling when you get these intermittent problems. The highlight is visible on programmes not scheduled to record, but invisible on those coloured in red. I was wondering if it were rendering order, but you would think not if other skins don't behave the same way.

On with the Sherlock Holmes hat to see what I can find....

 

[Rob Hexenmeister]

This works correctly for me. The first screenshot below shows the border highlight for a programme that is currently recording, and the second screenshot shows the border highlight for a programme scheduled to record in the future:

View attachment 209149 View attachment 209150

Strangely, this all seems to happen without defining anything specific to the border highlight. The only odd aspect that I noticed is the texture (image) that is used for the border highlight, namely
tvguide_highlight_border.png. This is a 1x1 single-pixel image. It is not a frame. This suggests to me that internally the skin engine is using the support for borders.

Very few skins use borders, because mostly borders do not work correctly. However, there is one combination of settings that does work correctly, and that is when the image used to fill the border frame is a single pixel. In this case, the skin engine simply repeats the single pixel horizontally and vertically as many times as necessary to fill the border frame. This gives the border frame the important property that the thickness of the frame remains constant as the frame is resized to fit different shapes and/or different sizes (this is exactly the behaviour that you want for the EPG, where the width of the EPG grid cell varies according to the duration of the programme).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

Thank you, yes, I identified the highlight png and it seems to work on other skins apart from DefaultWide (not HD) which is the one I am building my theme on. I am rather baffled by this inconsistency, especially between red coloured programmes and green/uncoloured ones. I do hate it when there is no apparent logic to a problem!

I will report back. (You don't happen to know the texture.png that is used to highlight recordings scheduled do you? I may have a play with that)

RH

 

[CyberSimian]

I identified the highlight png and it seems to work on other skins apart from DefaultWide (not HD) which is the one I am building my theme on.

The skin that I have been developing for my own use is also based on the old "DefaultWide" (not "DefaultWideHD"), but the border highlight works correctly for me.

You don't happen to know the texture.png that is used to highlight recordings scheduled do you? I may have a play with that

All of the textures used by the EPG have names that begin "tvguide_" in the "Media" folder within the skin folder. There are 64 such files in my media folder (inherited from "DefaultWide"), but that does not mean that they are all used. The ones that indicate programmes scheduled to record have "rec" in the name, and tvguide_recButton_Focus_middle is certainly red. But there are other red buttons, so it is not obvious which one is used for the normal case.

You may need to change an image file temporarily and then test, to find the ones that are used. But remember that if you change any image files, you need to delete the cache files for your skin, otherwise MP will continue to use the old images. MP will regenerate the cache files automatically if they don't exist when MP starts.

It is not obvious why your border highlight is not appearing for programmes scheduled to record.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Rob Hexenmeister]

It is not obvious why your border highlight is not appearing for programmes scheduled to record.

tvguide_recButton_Focus_middle

Best reference is DefaultWideHD

Pleased to say that I have solved this, and believe it or not, it was a fault with the recording pin control on the xml which had the knock on effect with the highlight, which only goes to show the sensitivity of the EPG xml. If nothing else you confirmed what I thought and where I needed to look and thanks to your input, it is now rectified.