[mythtv-users] New blue-abstract theme 1.8

[Joseph Fry]

> **
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I just wanted to announce on the mailing list that a new version of the
> blue-abstract theme is out.
> It has undergone a major rewrite. There were tons of changes, which can be
> seen in the changelog<ftp://miroku.no-ip.com/blue-abstract-wide_changelog>or on
> github <https://github.com/MythTV-Themes/blue-abstract-wide>.
>
> Check out the screenshots on the wiki<http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Blue_Abstract_Theme>
> .
>
> Please tell me if you find some improvements or issues.
>
One think I've noticed that bugs me... and it's likely my system more than
anything... but navigating around the video gallery causes some major
flickering.

Every time I move to a new video it redraws every cover on the screen...
first displaying the default image you set, then drawing the cover on
top.... sure it happens almost instantly, but it causes the whole screen to
flicker so much that I'm afraid I'll give my wife a seizure if I move
around to fast.

I don't remember it doing this on the previous version, and now that I've
upgraded I can't revert back to confirm.  I believe that the last version
had some sort of cursor while this version 'zooms' into the cover... I
suspect that's what is causing the redraws.

I am glad you got rid of the background images in the gallery view... they
were always too slow to load and hurt the 'smooth' factor, but this
constant redrawing is far more annoying.

I have plenty of RAM free (300MB), and even moving around as fast as I can
doesn't push my CPU above 30%.  It could be because I run diskless (iscsi)
which may mean added latency to load the images (but I'd assume they'd be
in RAM after a pass through all the videos).

Anyway... it's still my favorite theme by a large margin, but I would
really appreciate any tips on how to resolve this one little thing.

A couple of minor things, since your asking for feedback (a lot of this is
probably out of your control):

- The date/time area at the top is too narrow to fit a long date format
(mine currently says "Fri 14 Sep, 3:01 am", and fits, but it wouldn't if it
were "Thu 23 Sep, 12:00 am" due to the larger letters).  Great use of that
screen real estate by the way, I love it.

- The background image when the "Watch Videos" menu item is selected is
considerably brighter (bright wall in bg)  than other menu option
backgrounds... draws my attention away from the menu every time I move past
it.

- No background on the "Watch a Disk", "plugins", or "Advanced" menu
options when using the "Media Center Menu Theme".  there are others, but
those are the only ones on the main menu missing a background image.

- the default cover image is the same for folders as it is for videos...
not sure if it can be changed, but it would be nice.

- the background image flickers when browsing through episodes of a show on
the Watch recordings screen... probably nothing you can do about it, but if
the background image stays the same, why must it draw the blue background
then redraw the artwork again causing the flash of blue every time I scroll
up or down the list?

THANKS AGAIN FOR A GREAT THEME!
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