OSD fixes and/or improvements (and another suggestion)

[EnigMAUS75]

Hi at all!

I'm EnigMAUS75 and i'm a new member of this forum! I'm from Italy and i can speak in italian or english (not french, sorry! )!

Thanks A LOT to developers and contributors for PouchinTV/PouchinTV Mod! It's a little masterpiece! Really!

[SUGGESTIONS/FEATURE REQUESTS]

- OSD font size bigger (by a factor of 2x at least) to comply to "10-foot" rule
- Option to change position or simply center the channel name relative to the output TV screen

OR

- At an higher level, options to define OSD structure (position, fontsize, elements, layout etc.) via configuration or simply by edit a configuration file

AND

- Support for translations
- Support for foreign frequency/channels list

Good ideas? It's feasible in short/mid term?

For translation i propose me for ITALIAN translation!

[MY CONFIGURATION (TO CONTRIBUTE TO PROJECT)]

CPU: AMD Phenom X4 940 AM2+
Motherboard: Asus M4N78 (chipset nVidia nForce with no integrated video)
RAM: 4GB DDR2
GPU: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4770 512MB GDDR5
Operating system: Windows XP Professional SP3 x86 32 bit with all latest hotfixes
PouchinTV Mod version 0.6.2.295 (W32 Unicode)
Tuner: Asus MyCinema EHD2100PT Dual Tuner
Tested?: Yes, with excellent results (but for only viewing, no recording yet, no dual tuner support yet)

Bye to all!

--EnigMAUS75

[Gingko]

I'm EnigMAUS75 and i'm a new member of this forum! I'm from Italy and i can speak in italian or english (not french, sorry! )!

Hello EnigMAUS75, and welcome to this forum.

you let me realize that maybe we should think about opening a forum section dedicated to English language support.
(But as long as we don't have any product in other language, I don't know if it makes enough sense yet)

Thanks A LOT to developers and contributors for PouchinTV/PouchinTV Mod! It's a little masterpiece! Really!

[SUGGESTIONS/FEATURE REQUESTS]

- OSD font size bigger (by a factor of 2x at least) to comply to "10-foot" rule
- Option to change position or simply center the channel name relative to the output TV screen

OR

- At an higher level, options to define OSD structure (position, fontsize, elements, layout etc.) via configuration or simply by edit a configuration file

OSD font size bigger? Why? Isn"t it large enough like that?

Maybe channel names could be larger, but about program names, it already happens sometimes with the current font that the string doesn't fit in the whole screen width, I'm little scary about how it would be if the font was even larger again!

AND

- Support for translations

There is already a slowly running discussion about implementing multi language interface, this is really necessary and this will certainly happen one day or another, but we have very few developers, and there are at least two major evolutions expected (closed captions and time shifting) that have a higher priority than this one.

- Support for foreign frequency/channels list

Which ones? Do you have a precise channel/frequency system that you want to have supported?
It would certainly motivate us better for implementing that if we had a concrete situation to support and somebody for testing it!

Good ideas? It's feasible in short/mid term?

In mid or long term, certainly.
But as I said above, we have very few active developers.

For translation i propose me for ITALIAN translation!

I note it, and I will thing about you when time will come, if ever we are still alive on that time.

Gingko

[EnigMAUS75]

Thanks for welcome Gingko!

I understand all responses to my questions but:

- For a very quick translation system at a code level i've found a solution.
- An ption for fontsize of channel name/OSD is very hard to add?
- I propose me to realize frequency/channel list for Italy (all regions) and/or Italy national channels logos.
- I want to eventually realize an italian guide/fansite for PouchinTV Mod: do I have official permission?

Bye!

-- EnigMAUS75

[Gingko]

- For a very quick translation system at a code level i've found a solution.

We already have some ideas about that, but please explain?

- An ption for fontsize of channel name/OSD is very hard to add?

Actually I am currently reviewing OSD in order to have it able to support closed captions, I don't expect to add this right now, but I can think about making it easier for the future.

- I propose me to realize frequency/channel list for Italy (all regions) and/or Italy national channels logos.

Why thinking about regions? We previously had that in Pouchin TV Mod for France and recently decided to suppress it because the number of frequency sets have become too large, because also that they change too often, because this is hard to maintain, and because this kind of list is actually useless as scanning all frequencies, although needing more time, completely fills this need.

About Italy I just need to have precisions about the available channel range and bandwidth if they are not the same as the French ones, and of course logos in our current resolution (that is, 16 × 16 .bmp, 16 or 256 colors, with transparency support on the top left pixel color).
Also, I'm not sure but I think a little about putting channel logos on OSD, so just in case, think also a little about providing larger logos (probably .png with transparency but not too large in byte size).

A good thing for us if you can would also having a 30 to 60 seconds recording for each available multiplex, as whole multiplex recording (using the dedicated recording method). Of course this needs that you must already be able to receive these programs.
Yes, this makes huge files, but if you do that, I can indicate you a mean for sending them.
Don't worry if some multiplexes contain channels that you are not able to see and/or to hear.

- I want to eventually realize an italian guide/fansite for PouchinTV Mod: do I have official permission?

No problem, but where do you expect to publish that?

Don't forget that Pouchin TV Mod is expected to have more features added in the future, so if you make this kind of guide, be prepared to have to update it relatively frequently.

Gingko

[Gingko]

For your information:

As I just created an English language section in the forum, I moved this topic into this new section.

Gingko

[EnigMAUS75]

Thanks for English support of the PTVMod Forum!

THE IDEA FOR TRANSLATION OF PTVMOD (FOR CURRENT VERSION aka v0.6.2.x)

I can wrote a small utility that:

- analyze all the source tree to find [TEXT("<string>")] occourrences
- for each entry write in a database file (plain text or sqlite format) the original string and an empty string placeholder (eg.: <french_string>,<english_string>)
- this father-file is named "ptvm_transdef_fre2eng.txt"
- so I fill corrispondence beetween french strings and english correspondents and re-save "ptvm_transdef_fre2eng.txt" (manually or by other method)
- based on this file the my program substitute automatically french strings with english correspondents or ["ERROR_TRANSLATION_STRING_NOT_FOUND"] for orphan entries in all source tree files
- it's possibile, in a second time, to create an interface that create automatically a "ptvm_transdef_eng2<LNG>.txt" and successively "ptvm_transdef_fre2eng.txt" file to permit a user to translate from english to another foreign language not yet implemented
- at the end it's, even at the current level of development of PTVMod it's possibile for you to quick-build x86 and x64 versions "translated to Italian language" and so on of PTVMod with a safety level of control of the source
- the only problem is.... preference files language that is French so OR i implement a file esclusion list for text search and replace or you change the language of canaux.ini, chaines.xml, config.ini to US/UK English!

From 0 to 100, what score to my idea? What do you think about?

Bye!

--EnigMAUS75

[Gingko]

THE IDEA FOR TRANSLATION OF PTVMOD (FOR CURRENT VERSION aka v0.6.2.x)

I can wrote a small utility that:

- analyze all the source tree to find [TEXT("<string>")] occourrences
- for each entry write in a database file (plain text or sqlite format) the original string and an empty string placeholder (eg.: <french_string>,<english_string>)
- this father-file is named "ptvm_transdef_fre2eng.txt"
- so I fill corrispondence beetween french strings and english correspondents and re-save "ptvm_transdef_fre2eng.txt" (manually or by other method)
- based on this file the my program substitute automatically french strings with english correspondents or ["ERROR_TRANSLATION_STRING_NOT_FOUND"] for orphan entries in all source tree files
- it's possibile, in a second time, to create an interface that create automatically a "ptvm_transdef_eng2<LNG>.txt" and successively "ptvm_transdef_fre2eng.txt" file to permit a user to translate from english to another foreign language not yet implemented
- at the end it's, even at the current level of development of PTVMod it's possibile for you to quick-build x86 and x64 versions "translated to Italian language" and so on of PTVMod with a safety level of control of the source
- the only problem is.... preference files language that is French so OR i implement a file esclusion list for text search and replace or you change the language of canaux.ini, chaines.xml, config.ini to US/UK English!

From 0 to 100, what score to my idea? What do you think about?

Hi EnigMAUS75,

Your idea could be interesting but:

• Analyzing the source files may be harder than you expect: not all strings are enclosed in a TEXT() macro, and it can even happen that some of them would be generated by miscellaneous macros.
• Some strings are also composite, meaning that they are generated in many variants by concatenating fragments, or by using printf style formatting.
• There are also many debugging strings which are not expected to be translated.

We don't want to generate one version per language, this would be too hard to maintain. We rather expect to have only one language and a dynamic translation system inside the software, allowing users to quickly switch between available languages by choosing among a language list.

Providing a new language would just imply to have the corresponding translation file (maybe in text format) in the same directory (or a subdirectory of it) as the software itself.

Also, we don't expect translating from French as it would be more difficult to find translators from French than from English.
When translation will be implemented, we plan to hard translate the whole software in English, and basically provide at least one English to French back translation.

For difficult cases, it is not impossible that regular expressions could be used for some strings.

I am, for example, a user of products from Grigsoft products, which uses a translation system like that, and I must say that this works very well.

Preference files are a special case, where I think about hard coding both French and English in the software (in order to maintain compatibility with previous versions), and make the software able to understand both languages in all configurations, but generate French keywords for French users and English keywords for any other language users, possibly based on the operating system language rather than on the user choice.

Some people also suggested to use the GNU gettext library which, I think, works on a similar principle, but I didn't have time for even studying the case right now.

Gingko

[Ford Prefect]

Hi
I am very glad that an english version of Pouchin TV is planified.
It certainly deserves it.
For channel list I believe that the current scanning system should be improved to take into account
the various differences between countries.
Italy is certainly a good candidate for testing as I think they use lots of variations: Band 3 for example.
Not having a huge list of the various transmitters is an advantage of Pouchin :It is small.
I will try to help by surveying the english section of the forum but I'm not a programmer.