Text2skin-plugin

Description

Screenshot

The text2skin plugin is designed to load and interpret a set of files describing the layout of the On Screen Display and to make this "Skin" available to VDR via Setup -> OSD in the main menu. Of course it is possible to load more than one text-based skin this way and to choose between them while running VDR. All skins may be themeable (you can create your own color-theme) and translateable as the author of the skin wishes.

Skins

New Skins are copied to the configuration directory of the plugin

mkdir -p /etc/vdr/plugins/text2skin
tar -zxvf /path/to/demo.tgz -C /etc/vdr/plugins/text2skin

For Skin Developers

For all those who which to develop a new skin, or want to alter an existent one, there is documentation in the plugin package and here

• Text2skin-skin creation
• Text2skin-skin reference

After the skin is done, one should consider publishing it at [1].

Hardware requirements

There are two versions of skins for the text2skin plugin

• "90kb" for standard OSD
• "1mb" for OSD of modded full featured cards

If a skin with two many colors for the OSD memory is used, one can end up in a non-readable or even not displayed OSD.

Software requirements

• nothing : only XPM images with no transparency/alpha channel
• ImageMagick : many different image formats (slower than imlib2)
• Imlib2 : many different image formats (see problems)

Both can be used together, but it's of no use.

Installation

To install ImageMagick

cd $SOURCEDIR
tar jxvf ImageMagick-<VERSION>.tar.bz2
cd ImageMagick-<VERSION>
./configure --prefix=/usr/local \
            --without-perl \
            --without-dps \
            --without-fpx \
            --without-gslib \
            --without-jbig \
            --without-jp2 \
            --without-lcms \
            --without-tiff \
            --without-xml \
            --without-x
make
make install
ldconfig

See plugin installation

Patches

For DVB cards which are extended to 4MB memory $SOURCEDIR/VDR/dvbosd.c has to be altered to use the advanced OSD feature (more colors, bigger windows)

#define MAXOSDMEMORY 1000000

and recompile VDR.

Configuration

The skins are placed in the plugins configuration directiory

cd /etc/vdr/plugins
mkdir text2skin
cd text2skin
cp /path/to/skin-package.tgz ./
tar xvzf skin-package.tgz

Problems

• Use of the imlib2 library together with the graphtft-plugin can lead to crashes.

Links

[1]	http://www.magoa.net/linux/index.php?view=text2skin	Plugin homepage
[2]	http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/imlib2.html	Imlib2 Homepage
[3]	http://www.imagemagick.org	imagemagick Homepage
[4]	http://www.vdrskins.org/vdrskins	Skins for the text2skin plugin