Skinning XGuide

[Kevl]

Hi

I am trying to rescale XGuide to suit a 1280 x 720 screen res.

Have made good progress so far but cant seem to move the bottom right-hand corner of the guide towards the right (it seems stuck near 700 pixels across).


Is this hard coded in the XGuide2j application?


Kev

[fla]

XGuide is quite skinnable but there may be a hardcoded value in there somewhere. I assume you've played with MinuteDraw and MinutePixels to change how many minutes wide the guide is and how how many pixels in each minute. There's also guideWidth which in theory can be used instead of the other two but I've never tried it. If nothing works, post your new skin files and I'll try to see if there's a hard coded value that I can make skinnable.

[Kevl]

Many thanks Fla,

I did try the guideWidth parameter. It didn't seem to help. - Though I might have made a mistake somewhere.

The reason for playing with the higher res is to improve the clarity of fonts etc.

The skins I have posted are still work in progress. They don't look pretty - yet. But you will see the problem with the width of the epg window. I'm skinning for GBPVR99.12 rather than the new PX2 stuff. I'm only looking to skin the TV parts of GBPVR.



Kev

[fla]

I looked at the code and found that XGuide is figuring out the size of the screen by looking at background.jpg in the skin's root directory. This has been mentionned here. In my case I use the blue skin so the file is:

Code:

C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\skin\Blue\background.jpg

I tried putting a 920x720 background.jpg there and changed the Background composite image in skin-horiz to 920 pixels wide and it worked. Your skin didn't seem to work for me but I noticed you used MinutesDraw instead of MinuteDraw.

[Kevl]

many thanks fla

Will attend to skin files in the way you recommend.


Kev

[Kevl]

Have now got most of Xguide EPG grids looking OK but am stuck on the popup screens.

When in Xguide then pressing return on a show in the EPG grid launches a popup giving options to watch/record etc.

Where are these popup windows defined? Have looked in all of the skin files in the Guide2j directory and it is not at all obvious. I need to increase the button spacings and move the program text in the popups.

Kev

[fla]

Good to hear you're progressing well with the skinning. XSuite is made up of XRecord, XGuide and XSearch. The popups in XGuide and some from XRecord are actually part of XSearch so the skins you want are therefore under fastfind. I'm not sure XSearch is fully skinnable but if you hit a hardcoded value I'll try to make it skinnable.

Keep in mind that changes in fastfind will affect all of XSuite.

[Kevl]

Many thanks again for your kind help fla,

I'm learning most of the skinning by trial and error but I'm beginning to get the hang of it.

So far (even having scaled all the skins in the XRecord Suite) I have found a lrage number of primitives that do not appear to have controlling parameters in the skin files.

These include the positions of the text items on many of the popup screens in Xrecord, Xguide and XSearch.

XSearch in particular seems to have lots of items whose positions are not configurable via the skin files. For example the vertical spacing of the keys in the on screen keyboard seems to be fixed and the spacing of the items in the 3 main lists (alphabet, program name, date) do not seem to respond to being changed.

I can only guess that they assume (internally) that there are say 480lines. My attempt to scale to 720lines would then seem to be problematic.


Kev

[fla]

I've posted a new beta version to the wiki that allows skinning of the XSearch keyboard. The KeyboardKeyElement element in fastfind\skin.xml now has a bunch of new attributes.

WARNING: Backup your existing skin files before re-installing XRecord!

I only have a development environment for the new XRecord version but it's basically the same except for the installer. If you install the new beta XRecord version on an old gbpvr version, you'll need to copy the plugins from the Plugins\XSuite directory one level up to the Plugins\ directory where the old gbpvr looks for plugins.

There are indeed many hardcoded things in XSuite, just point them out and it will improve step by step.

[Kevl]

I'll give your new version a try.

I'm using the 99.12 version as I get better video quality when using overlay.

Pls find attached the current state of my skin file.

It runs OK now but lots of the text is misplaced on many of the popup screens.

Kev