Status Quo

The current method of finding and installing tv & radio logos:

1. Searching for logo images which are scattered across

• The forum as attachments
• Inside the wiki under regional customization
• In the plugins repository

2. Then the user may need to manually copy the thumbs into the appropriate folder

Not user friendly at all!!

What would be better:

A central specific place where all logo images for tv & radio are stored
A GUI + MP Config method where users could just select their region then choose from available logos and have them automatically installed.

My Proposal

Part One: Website Repository

• A central place where all logos are stored
• Sub divided at level 1 into TV / Radio
• Further subdivided by at level 2 by regions (optional subdivision at level 3 for providor)
• Website automatically creates a preview thumbnail from a montage of the first 4 images in the logopack zip
• Logo packs can be updated by author to include additional images
• Users can manually download a pack from the website, for purposing of editing

Part Two: Logo installer/chooser/downloader

Below is my concept of how the GUI would work

1. It covers initial region / region+providor selection and then selection + download of a logo pack.

2. Matching of logo image name to channel name

3. Correction of miss-matches

4. Toggling between current logo and the newly download one

5. Combining multiple logo packs (can combine any number of packs with this concept)

Comments

The advantage of this proposal is that it doesn't actually change the way tv logos are handled within mediaportal, so it can be implemented with out any changes that would break other parts of mediaportal.

The concept can be adjusted if you are using a central logo database on the tvserver.  What happens is the logo images are stored on the tv server instead.  When you enter the settings menu the client connects to the tvserver, and instead of looking at it's own tv thumbs folder it looks on the tvserver.  It saves any changes to the tvservers logo folder.  If tvserver is not available then the a dialog box comes up saying you must be connected to tv server before you are allowed to change logos.  Whenever a client connects to the tvserver it checks if the logos have changed on the tvserver, if they have changed then it updates it's own logo directory.

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GUI Interfa?ce

1. Selection of Region / Logo Pack

When first entering you are asked for your region

Next you are asked to select a logo pack, notice the thumbnail preview that was generated by the repository website

2. Matching of logo image to channel name

The plugin has found "four.png" in the /thumbs/tv/logos folder, there are no other images there currently.

There is no logo for "TV3" because there is no "TV3.png" in the logo pack, the author called it "TV Three.png"

The TV3 text is greyed out and the checkbox is unticked because at this stage the TV3 logo will not be changed.
I have the TV3 -> New logo box currently highlighted because I am about to select a correct logo from the pack.

3. Correction of miss-match

I pressed enter on the missing TV3 logo and I am now selecting the correct TV3 Logo from all the images inside the pack.

If I select the option for "image from a different region/logo pack" I am presented with the following 3 context menus in a row;
1. Choose region , 2. Choose icon pack 3. Choose from a list of the images inside that icon pack

4. Toggling between current tv logo and newly download one

I now have a new logo image matched to TV 3.

Just for an example, I have unchecked FOUR.  This means that the existing four.jpg will be used and will not be replaced

Someone could do this if they already had a current logo image for a particular channel (eg. self made or from a previously selected pack, or if you needed more than one logo pack to fill your channel list, say you had both cable and terrestrial tv channels but wanted to use the current FOUR logo which was duplicated in both packs)

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After exiting the menu I am asked to confirm changes which will then update the logos inside the thumbs/tv/logos directory

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5. Combining multiple logo packs

If you wanted to combine multi packs at this step you would go back into settings and click TV Logos, return to the selection screen, select the region/providor then the 2nd logo pack, correct any matches that needed correction, then you could toggle between current logo vs new logo, to achieve the desired combination between the two packs.

You can repeat any number of times to combine logos from any number of packs.

You would do this if you had multiple providors, or perhaps you had a sattelite so you had channels from multiple countries, or maybe you like some logos from one pack and some from another pack.