Channel icons

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Revision as of 10:15, 22 September 2013 by Stevegoodey (talk | contribs) (Universal Location: Added 'sure')

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Channel Icon Download System

As of 0.21, MythTV includes a channel icon download system in mythtv-setup which will attempt to automatically download icons for channels in your database from services.mythtv.org. If it cannot find an icon it will present you with a list of options, an the ability to define your own search parameters.

To configure icon downloading in mythtv-setup:

  • run "mythtv-setup"
  • select "Channel Editor"
  • click on "Icon Download"
  • select either "Download all icons.." or "Rescan for missing icons.."


Universal Location

Starting with version 0.27, a single location for channel icons can be created on the master backend. The only symlink required is for mythweb. Remove it's .../data/tv_icons directory and link it to the chosen single directory. Make sure that directory read/write for user mythtv and choose the same group that is used by mythweb, e.g. www-data (mode 775.)

Symlinks added for prior versions (or old channels/ChannelIcons directories and their contents) can be removed. Obviously after copying icons to a new directory if required.

If a ChannelIcons Storage Group doesn't already exist, follow the 1st 2 paragraphs in the section below. Then restart the backend then frontends.

Pre 0.27 Instructions

By default the icon will be downloaded to the /home/<user>/.mythtv/channels directory. This is not very friendly when you have multiple frontends and wish them all to share the icons. One method to get around this is to use a symlink for this directory that directs to a network located directory that all your frontends have access to, say /var/mythtv/channels for example.

Before downloading the icons, do the following, or similar as per your distribution:

rm ~/.mythtv/channels -rf
sudo mkdir /var/mythtv/channels
sudo chown <user>:<group> /var/mythtv/channels
ln -s /var/mythtv/channels ~/.mythtv/channels

You will want to run

rm ~/.mythtv/channels -rf
ln -s /var/mythtv/channels ~/.mythtv/channels

for all the users that can run MythTV as well.

Storage Group Location

As of 0.25, there is support for using Storage Groups for access to the icons.

To use storage groups for channel icons, you will need to create a new storage group named ChannelIcons. Move your icons to that location. You should then go into mythtv-setup and remove the absolute paths, leaving just the filenames.

It is important to understand that this support is not yet feature complete, as both mythfilldatabase and mythtv-setup still download icons to the ~/.mythtv/channels/ directory, and attempt to retrieve them from that location, but if you run the applications on the same machine as the storage group is located, you can create a link from ~/.mythtv/channels/ to the storage group location as a mitigation. Also, mythweb does not use storage groups for accessing the icons.

Channel Icon Sources

One of the best sources of channel icons is http://www.lyngsat-logo.com/ . There, you can browse the available icons and choose those appropriate for your system. However, doing so can be a lot of work (requiring many page hits and a lot of time). Once downloaded you should put the resulting JPEG files into .mythtv/channels/ for the user running the front-end. To add them to a channel you will need to run mythtv-setup and go to the channel editor and specify the icon file name for each channel.

Another source of channel icons is http://www.iconharmony.com/ which is targeted for icons for the harmony remote. Some of the available icons are more stylized than the official icon (the person running the site is a graphic artist). As with the previous source, finding an appropriate icon can be a lot of work.

International Channel Logos