MythUI Theme Development

Overview

As of MythTV version .22, the theme engine is much more flexible and robust. This guide will serve as a comprehensive reference for developing a MythTV theme, including documentation of all available MythTV widgets and the basic XML files that must be completed to have a working theme.

Terminology

Conceptually, MythTV themes are fairly simple. They are a series of XML theme files, and any associated media called by those files such as images. Within each XML theme file, individual screens in MythTV are defined as windows. Each window contains MythUI Widgets, and the widgets contain various attributes. Take this simple example of a MythUI window:

<mythuitheme>
    <window name="MyFirstWindow">
        <textarea name="MyFirstTextArea">
            <area>0,0,1280,720</area>
            <font>basesmall</font>
            <value>This is some text!</value>
        </textarea>
    </window>
</mythuitheme>

Let's discuss the code we just looked at. Every tag in XML must be opened and closed, just like in HTML. If you don't match all of your tags, your theme will not work! Every MythUI theme file (with one exception to be explained later) opens with the <mythuitheme> tag and ends with </mythuitheme>. Inside of the theme, we defined a window called "MyFirstWindow." Inside of that window, we created a textarea widget with three attributes, area, font, and value. How each of these things works will be explained in a bit, but this is the most basic kind of structure found in every themed screen in MythTV.