[mythtv-users] using themes on a 640x480 display

[Ray Olszewski]

At 06:25 PM 3/3/2003 -0500, John Danner wrote:
>You need to set your MythTV GUI size in setup to 640x480.
>
>http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-18.html#ss18.5

Thanks, guys. Like I said, something obvious.

One thought ... in the spirit of Charles Weaver's suggestion to me earlier 
today ... whoever maintains the above HowTo should consider updating the 
instuctions a bit.

The current instructions say:

"In 0.7, edit the file themes.txt. In 0.8, from "mythfrontend" go to 
Setup->Appearance. To ensure that your new dimension settings, exit and 
restart MythTV."

Since the default GUI is 800x600, there is no way I can see to use it *on* 
a 640x480 display to change the setting *to* 640x480 ... the "Setup" choice 
is in the invisible and unreachable lower-right corner of such a mismatched 
display ... making that part of the instructions a Catch-22 ... unless of 
course the 0.8 version has changed the accessibility of this choice in some 
way I cannot see.

And for version 0.7-13 of MythTV (the Debian version I've installed here), 
the filename "themes.txt" is incorrect ... the actual file (at least on the 
Debian install) is /etc/theme.txt. (And it is also missing from the .deb 
binary ... I had to add it from the src-deb package.) A small difference to 
be sure, but one worth correcting nonetheless.

So I'd suggest modifying the above HowTo section to tell users of version 
0.7 the correct file name. Since I'm not running 0.8, I don't really know 
if the instructions for it are workable, but on the guess that they are 
not, I'd suggest modifying its part of the instructions to steer the user 
to a config file he can edit, as in version 0.7 (/etc/theme.txt, if it is 
still used).

Next, I'd consider shipping MythTV with the default set to 640x480, not 
800x600. It's pretty easy to use a GUI Setup command to make the GUI 
larger, but all but impossible to use it to make it smaller if the default 
places the Setup widget off the visible screen.

Finally, this information might be better placed in section 10.1 (Using 
Themes with MythTV) than off in section 18 (Miscellaneous), where it is 
easily missed (at least I missed it there).