Adjust color of watched bar

[VCRUser]

I found the place in sage7.xml to make the watched bar taller (so it's easier to see when a show is highlighted in the Malore recordings view in the standard UI), but would also like to experiment with making it a different color (likewise, to make it easier to see). What strings should I look for in the .xml to tweak (and is there a resource available to map colors to the required hex value format)?

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by VCRUser

I found the place in sage7.xml to make the watched bar taller (so it's easier to see when a show is highlighted in the Malore recordings view in the standard UI), but would also like to experiment with making it a different color (likewise, to make it easier to see). What strings should I look for in the .xml to tweak (and is there a resource available to map colors to the required hex value format)?

Not sure if it's for Malore or not but found 'PartialBarBGColor' and 'PartialBarFGColor' in there with hex codes that match red and light green.

Use https://www.hexcolortool.com to convert hex colors.

[VCRUser]

Originally Posted by wnjj

Not sure if it's for Malore or not but found 'PartialBarBGColor' and 'PartialBarFGColor' in there with hex codes that match red and light green.

Use https://www.hexcolortool.com to convert hex colors.

Thanks. I'll check both of those out.
Update: The colors noted by the PartialbarFG/FGColor are bright red & green, which appear on recordings that are in progress, showing how much of the recording has completed. What I'd like to change is the blue bar that appears on completed recordings that are partially watched. The issue I'm having is that when a partially-watched recording has focus, both it and the partially-watched indicator are aqua blue, so the indicator is hard to discern. I'm thinking of changing it to yellow, green, or pink. Could the object be multilmenu_blue_bar_color? It is now given as 0xadb3, which is a bit confusing, since 0x... values usually specify unicode characters, not colors. When I enter "00adb3" into the hexcolortool.com screen, the result looks like the color I currently see on screen. However, previous experiments with changing that number had no visible results, which made me wonder if it was the correct object to tweak. But then, I was entering random values, since I didn't have the hexcolortool reference, and the values I was entering could have simply been invalid.
So, once I bring that box back up for further work, I'll try some additional values that appear to yield the colors I'm considering.

[VCRUser]

That doesn't seem to be the right thing to tweak. Currently there's some code that reads

<value>GetProperty("multimenu_blue_bar_color", "#0xadb3")</value>, and appears under <panel name = "watched bar" sym="BASE -61408">

However changing #0xadb3 to something else has no apparent effect.

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by VCRUser

That doesn't seem to be the right thing to tweak. Currently there's some code that reads

<value>GetProperty("multimenu_blue_bar_color", "#0xadb3")</value>, and appears under <panel name = "watched bar" sym="BASE -61408">

However changing #0xadb3 to something else has no apparent effect.

GetProperty is trying to pull that property from the sage.properties file and the #0xadb3 is only the default if it's not found. I checked my properties file and see that setting there. If that's the right one, it seems like an easy fix now.

[wnjj]

Sometimes my system takes a seemingly long time at that step. Did you wait minutes? Anything in the log file when it hangs there? A color property shouldn’t have messed anything up. Did you edit it with SageTV shut down?

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by VCRUser

Thanks. I'll check both of those out.
Update: The colors noted by the PartialbarFG/FGColor are bright red & green, which appear on recordings that are in progress, showing how much of the recording has completed. What I'd like to change is the blue bar that appears on completed recordings that are partially watched. The issue I'm having is that when a partially-watched recording has focus, both it and the partially-watched indicator are aqua blue, so the indicator is hard to discern. I'm thinking of changing it to yellow, green, or pink. Could the object be multilmenu_blue_bar_color? It is now given as 0xadb3, which is a bit confusing, since 0x... values usually specify unicode characters, not colors. When I enter "00adb3" into the hexcolortool.com screen, the result looks like the color I currently see on screen. However, previous experiments with changing that number had no visible results, which made me wonder if it was the correct object to tweak. But then, I was entering random values, since I didn't have the hexcolortool reference, and the values I was entering could have simply been invalid.
So, once I bring that box back up for further work, I'll try some additional values that appear to yield the colors I'm considering.

Missed this post earlier. To answer the format question, 0x as a prefix just means the number is in hex. In the case above, it just happens that the leading 0’s are omitted but colors are specified RGB with 2 hex chars (representing 0-255) per color. So 0x00adb3 is the proper full format, but without the leading zeros it can be shortened.

For more detail: hex is just base 16 with letters a-f representing 10-15. So the left digit is multiplied by 16 and added to the right digit. Converting ‘ad’ to decimal is 10x16+13 = 173 and ‘b3’ is 11x16+3 = 179. So that color is no red and about equal parts green and blue and fairly light.

[VCRUser]

Originally Posted by wnjj

Sometimes my system takes a seemingly long time at that step. Did you wait minutes? Anything in the log file when it hangs there? A color property shouldn’t have messed anything up. Did you edit it with SageTV shut down?

Turns out I'd inadvertently inserted text (I think it was text I'd meant to put in a search box but it ended up there instead) into the start of sage7.xml in the STVs. I found an error in the log claiming not to be able to find the file - which was obviously there. Opened the file and found & deleted the offending text. Problem solved - whew!

Then fiddled with various values for multimenu_blue_bar_color and fo und that B82AD5 (bright purple) shows up well both when the recording isn't selected and when it is. I'd also increased the height of the watched-bar to full height in the STV xml file (which is how it managed to be open to receive unintended text). Now I can clearly see the degree to which a show has been watched.

[wnjj]

[Tiki]

If you are going to edit the STV code, you would be much better off using the supplied SageTV Studio app. The xml code is not really meant to be edited directly. Studio is built in to Sage and extensively documented.

[VCRUser]

Originally Posted by Tiki

If you are going to edit the STV code, you would be much better off using the supplied SageTV Studio app. The xml code is not really meant to be edited directly. Studio is built in to Sage and extensively documented.

I have tried using Studio, but find Notepad or Notepad++ much easier to use. I guess if I were to do major editing, try to develop a full-blown theme or something, it might be worth while to study Studio, but when I was working on this I couldn't make it find the text stings I was searching for. Maybe I had to toggle something, select a different scope, or whatever, but strings I knew were in there weren't coming up.