Modifying MythTV’s Blue Abstract Theme – Recordings

After my first post about modifying the video list in MythTV’s Blue Abstract Theme, I got quite interested in tweaking the UI. I switched the background of the theme and was confronted with a new issue. Due to the background change, some of the previously subtle image shade differences were now much more apparent.

In the recordings list, there’s a description box that shows the description of the recorded show. This description box has a set of icons that specify properties of the recordings. The issue is that there’s a default set of icons that are grayed out:

The problem arises when your recording’s properties doesn’t match those default properties:

As you can see, the grayed out properties doesn’t match the recording properties, so the default grayed out property is replaced by a new property with a big grey box in the background. I think this looks quite ugly.

Modifying MythTV’s Blue Abstract Theme – Video list

One of the issues I’ve had with MythTV’s Blue Abstract Theme is that the video list screen is not at all to my liking. The lists are very narrow and (in my opinion) pretty useless unless you have proper metadata for all of your files. I only download IMDB metadata for movies. When I want to see movies I use the Browse mode where I can see all the movie metadata. The rest of the time I’m just browsing files in the video list. For this reason, it’s very important that the video list screen can fit as much file information as possible.

Here are the before (left) and after (right) screenshots:

  

Below is explained what I did to accomplish this. I’m using the theme version from 14.09.2010 with MythTV version 0.23. If you’re using a different version you might have to make some small adjustments to the instructions below, but the principle should be the same. As you will see, modifying themes is pretty simple!

Step 1/5: Make a copy of the original theme

The themes are located in /usr/share/mythtv/themes, so first thing is to make a copy of the theme.

su
cd /usr/share/mythtv/themes
cp -r blue-abstract-wide blue-abstract-wide-modded

We now have a copy of the original theme that we can safely work with.

Step 2/5: Rename the copied theme

In order to get this to appear as a different theme selectable from MythTV, rename the theme in blue-abstract-wide-modded/themeinfo.xml

<name>Blue Abstract/Modded</name>

The theme should now appear in mythfrontend as a selectable theme. Go ahead and select that theme and restart mythfrontend. You should now have the new theme running. Now you can start making changes.

MythTV themes

I’ve been using MythTV for many years now. During the years I’ve constantly been looking for new good themes. Unfortunately it seems that MythTV themes can be divided into two separate categories:

1. Usable
2. Good looking

I would like to have something that fits into both categories, but with a priority on usability! I had hoped that the new themes (Graphite, Arclight, Blue Abstract Theme) would solve this issue, but apparently not :-(

Right now I’m using MythBuntu, which is pretty good, but I’m getting bored with it. I would love to switch to the Blue Abstract Theme, but it still has issues. One example is that the video listings screen only can show 6 entries per screen, as compared to MythBuntu which can show 10. This may not sound like much but makes a huge difference when you are scrolling through a bit more videos.

I have also tried to modify the themes to get more to fit the screen, but that is a never-ending project as the changes need to be applied every time the themes are updated.