I had a lot of trouble finding a theme I liked. Most I either found too plain and unstyled, or too flashy and distracting. I spent a lot of looking around and trying out various themes before finally finding one that I felt to be just right.

The MythTV MePo Theme was designed by Zdzislaw Gorlicki. It was based on the work of a number of different theme designers and graphic artists (see the credits page on his website). He took the bits and pieces of some different MediaPortal themes and combined them into a very nice theme for MythTV. I felt he did a great job of creating something that has styling and personality, yet doesn't really distract you from the important parts of the UI. It's friendly and welcoming, but not overpowering.

Despite its wonderful design, the one aspect that I felt was lacking from the theme was the OSD. It just didn't click with me. It felt too plain, too dark, and didn't really have the excellent styling of the rest of the theme. I set out to create something I though was more fitting. Just by piecing the theme's graphics together and adding a little bit of Photoshop effect, I came up with something that I liked.

 

NOTE: This ODS theme requires mythtv version 0.21 to display properly
Download the MePo-Custom-OSD theme

The author of the MePo theme has begun working on the MePo theme for the next version of myth, 0.22, which is just getting under way at the moment. It appears he may no longer be updating the MePo theme for users of myth 0.21, and that MePo 0.45 may be the last release that works for those users.

For the moment (and probably for quite some time), my production machines are going to remain on mythtv 0.21-fixes, so I'll be keeping my own version up to date for now. I'd like to share my patches to the theme with anyone else who chooses to remain on myth 0.21

To install the patches, first download MePo Theme 0.45. Then download my patches. Install the MePo theme, then untar/unzip my patch and copy all of the included files into the MePo theme directory.

List of changes in the current patch:

Mar 19, 2008		* Fixes the xml file for the mythcontrols plugin (which failed to load)
		* Fixes a very very tiny graphical glitch that's only noticable at 1920x1080

Splashy is a graphic boot splash screen utility that works on debian, ubuntu, and a variety of other linux distributions.

Since I was building a dedicated mythtv box, I thought it would be nice if I could carry the MePo theme through to the rest of the system. I designed a theme for splashy that had the same styling as the MePo mythtv theme.



Download the MePo Splashy theme

In trying to build a new media center that was fiendly to the wife, I started to feel that none of the menu themes were really laid out in a very intuitive way. With TV recordings being hidden under the title "Media Library", along with videos, photos, and music, I didn't think that was the best arrangement. Likewise, the naming conventions of some menu items like "Optical Disks" isn't very friendly to someone who's not at all tech-savvy. Finally, there was one major flaw I saw in every menu layout...there were certain settings which were accessable without having to enter the Setup PIN. That meant someone else could get in and screw up the key bindings and certain other settings.

In looking at all of the available menu themes, I didn't find any that were favorable to me. Instead I gave up and created my own menu theme. I tried to use more friendly names and more logical grouping, make the more commonly accessed features easier to get at, and make sure all of the settings are protected by the Setup PIN.

A few caveats to using this menu theme. First, since I changed a lot of the menu item names, there are no translations available for any of the menu items. Second, I've only designed this around the plugins that I have installed, thus there are no entries for things like MythFlix, MythNews, etc.

 

Download the MC-Friendly theme

This is a script that was designed to monitor lirc for IR input and then perform actions when certain button combinations are performed. The types of events it can monitor for include:

• Button sequences (ex: Play-Play-Enter)
• Held button duration (ex: Play button held 1.5 seconds)
• Repeat count (ex: Play button held for 5 repeats)

The responses to events can depend on the current state of mythfrontend. The script has the ability to connect to the Network Control Port (NCP), issue commands, and return responses. The script has built in functionality for quickly checking the frontend's location ('query location'), as well as special handling for a few special cases (playing anything, playing a recorded program, or playing live tv), however it can handle any command supported by the NCP.

The response taken to an event can include:

• Sending a command to the NCP (ex: a key or a jumppoint)
• Executing an external script (via perl's system command)
• Any arbitrary perl code

This script can be used for many purposes. A few examples demonstrated in the script

• Rebooting/halting the machine via secret key combination not likely to be hit on accident
• A better guide button, which displays the appropriate guide depending on what you are doing, and also closes the guide if pressed again
• Sending multiple commands at a time to load or unload the commercial cutlist with a single keypress
• Skipping to the beginning/end of the recording if a skip button is held. This is somewhat similar to tivo's skip to end, but better since you can't easily do it by accident
• Emulating the functionality of the tivo button on a tivo remote (which alternates between jumping to main menu and the now playing list)

Download IR Watch

Over the years, I've seen many requests to allow browsing across tuners in LiveTV mode. As a lot of the developers don't use LiveTV mode, it's never been a priority, and thus always been answered with "Use the Program Guide instead!" I don't totally disagree with that statement...the program guide is a much better choice, and thats what I do. Yet I can't help but feel this missing feature somehow hurts the W.A.F. of mythtv, so I've gone ahead and implemented it.

This patch allows you to browse all channels from all tuners when in LiveTV. It adds a checkbox to the PlaybackOSD config screen to enable it. Finally, it adds an option to the OSD theme to display a message about what tuner the channel can be viewed on, or display a message that no tuner is available if all possible tuners for that channel are taken. Here's a screenshot of the error message:



This patch can be applied to 0.21-fixes.

This patch has been submitted under Ticket #4501. Until it gets merged into the trunk, you can get the patches from that page.

MythTV already had a method to allow customizing the playback speeds for fast forward and rewind, but lacked any way to configure it in the GUI. This patch provides the additional option of configuring slow motion playback speeds. It also allows you to override the reposition (skipback) amount on a per seeking speed basis. This allows you to, for example, configure it so that there is no repositioning at the slowest fast forward speed (like the way tivo does it), only a partial reposition at the second speed, and then the full repositioning amount for all other speeds.

This patch also adds a GUI configuration section on Seeking configuration page in the Playback settings.

 

This patch can be applied to 0.21-fixes.

This patch has been submitted under Ticket #4492. Until it gets merged into the trunk, you can get the patches from that page.

When you are use the mythmusic pluging and are playing some music, if you try to exit the plugin (perhaps to do other things in myth), you get prompted whether you want to stop playback or contiue playback. For myself, if I didn't want the music to keep playing, I'd hit the stop key first, so getting prompted every time gets a bit annoying. In addition, if I hit a jumppoint key (perhaps to jump into the photo gallery), music playback stops instantly with no option to exit.

This patch give you the option to configure the action to take when exiting. By default, it maintains the current behavior. However, you can also set it to always stop playing or to always continue playing. In either case, you can exit myth without being prompted. In addition, if you set it to always continue playing, it will do so even if you exit the plugin by using a jumppoint.

This patch can be applied to 0.21-fixes.

This patch has been submitted under Ticket #5008. Until it gets merged into the trunk, you can get the patches from that page.

The iMON LCD that comes with a lot of HTPC cases has undergone some significant protocol changes. There is a new model with USB hardware ID 15c2:0038, and it is incompatible with the version of the lirc_imon driver currently available in CVS.

Thanks to the work of several people over at the codeka.com forums (especially Dean Harding for the initial work on the iMON LCD, and madCoder for the 0038 patch) a lot of progress has been made on making the hardware functional, despite the lack of support the linux community has received from SoundGraph.

I've modified madCoder's patch to handle a few extra details with the new iMON model, and an extra detail the may be specific to the Thermaltake DH-101 case. The patch does the following:

Extended the LIRC code size to 8 bytes
Previously, the lirc driver only used the first 4 bytes of the 8 byte USB request buffer (URB). This was insufficient for the Thermaltake case, as the codes for its front panel buttons only varied in the 5th byte.

Normalized the URB data size
The driver was expecting all URBs to have 8 bytes of data, and ignoring everything else. However, the mouse functions on the pad remote only used 5 byte codes, and were thus getting ignored. I've extended all 5 byte codes to 8 bytes

Fixed handling for the pressure sensitive directional pad
The direction pad on the included pad remote was pressure sensitive, and thus (because of the way it was implemented) appeared to lirc as over 100 buttons instead of 4. I've added code to map all variations to just 4 directions, and handled a jitter problem when you are pressing too close to the diagonal and the direction keeps changing back and forth.


Also posted below is an updated lircd.conf file to deal with the 8 byte codes, as well as another lircd.conf file that handles the front panel buttons on the Thermaltake DH-101 case.

I also have a detailed posting on my blog dealing with getting iMON 0038 LCD working with LIRC.

Updated patch for the iMON LCD 0038 model
Lircd.conf file for the iMON pad remote
Lircd.conf file for the Thermaltake DH-101


I've also added a followup post on my blog dealing with getting iMON 0038 LCD working with LCDproc. The patches used in that posting are linked below. They are basically the patches from the codeka.com forums with a few tiny bug fixes and tweaks

Update version of Deans LCDproc patch for the iMON
Updated version of madCoder's LCDproc patch for the 0038 model iMON
patch for the LCDd.conf file

I've developed a custom application for driving the iMON LCD using data obtained from MythTV via various sources. This application does it's best at supporting the various icons and other features of the iMON LCD.

You can read about the application in the following 2 blog posts (screenshots on the second link):
Developng an iMON client for MythTV
MythTV iMON Server - alpha release 1

It's currently a work in progress. I've made alpha release 1 available for download. You can get it below. Please read the second of the above blog entries for tips on configuring it for your system

Download the MythTV iMON Server - Alpha Release 1
Download my custom perl modules