Problems with *very* short programmes in guide

[AndyCherry]

Some of the "in-betweens" in our TV guide are scheduled as programs in the XMLTV feed from ananova - they can be as little as 15 seconds long!    This causes issues in the TV guide in displaying blank gaps and non-shown items.  I don't know what the best solution is (not show short items?), but wanted to provide examples (see below):



The two programmes that cause the problems are show below:



and



Cheers,
Andy

[sub]

I suspect this is actually your xmltv file is partly to blame. There seems to be two things at play here.

I've just had a look at one of the ananova files. For the tweenies shown at the top of the page, there is gap in the TV guide before the tweenie starts (after bbc news update). This explains the empty patch.

The actual tweenie is not showing up because the program is so short that the way I did my math to work out the size of the visible rectangle ended up being less than 1 pixel wide. Doh! I never expected programmes this short.

[colin]

Can this be customised on the fly? What i mean is can the user select the scale to use so that if they want to view one hour in the window then you can scale up the rectangles so that short programs can be viewed?

How do other apps work which use XMLTV listings?

Cheers,

[sub]

At the moment is pretty specific (ie hardcoded) at a two hour window. I'm not sure how some of the others handle it. Andy, do you use these XMLTV files with any other program that shows the guide? I'd be interested to see what another program does with these short programmes. Another screen shot would be good.

[AndyCherry]

The only one I use currently is "TV Guide" which just displays in a text format. I'll find another program that uses xmltv files and report back...

[colin]

I have myHTPC on my machine at home. If i get the chance over the weekend i'll try this out and see what it looks like with short programmes.

Cheers,

[AndyCherry]

It's the EPG data not the program - this is how it looks in myHTPC...



and GBPVR...



Cheers,
Andy

[sub]

Fairly similar...

I guess the tweenie is the thick white line or very thin rectangle. I change the application to ensure that rectangle for each show is at least 1 or 2 pixels wide, then it should at the very least do the same as the pictures above.