Tarting Gemstone on V9

[RBraverman]

If there's a wiki somewhere about Gemstone - lead me snead ...

If not, is there a way to tart it up? I just saw the BTV theme (having come from BTV) which looks interesting, but a change in color, and the graphic in the attached would be a start.

[jorton]

If you want to personalize Gemstone you have quite a few options. Installing the themes in the plugin menu won't really work as Gemstone has its own images and theme structure so things will look a bit off.

From the main menu hit "esc" and then you will see some options for tarting up Gemstone.

"Flow Manager" - Setup the flows or views of you media. (Your screenshot is the non Flow recording menu that does not add too much)

"Theme Settings" - From there you have options for selecting different colour highlight sets (the blue outline in your screenshot), menu fonts and settings, transparencies for different elements of the UI, a background manager.

"Widget Manager" - Add widgets for upcoming recordings, recent recordings, drive space, weather, etc...

"Menu Manager" - Hide menu items or rearrange to your liking or use the Metro style menu for here. Very handy for getting rid of menus you don't use (photos, Music etc) and moving menu items around or even adding links to external programs like the Netflix app in a Windows setup. You can even assign backgrounds for each menu from here.

"Utility Functions" - This is where you tell Gemstone to look for fanart (BMT fanart locations) and how to cache it and what sizes etc.

"Weather Setup" - Where you setup the weather provider and select the weather icon set you want to use. You can also install the weather backgrounds (separate plugin to install from repo) and turn them on from here to cycle on the main menu based on current weather.

There are lots of ways to spice things up but you have to dig in a bit to do it. We made it so that you have many options to personalize.

Hopefully this can help get you started.

J

[RBraverman]

Originally Posted by jorton

If you want to personalize Gemstone you have quite a few options. Installing the themes in the plugin menu won't really work as Gemstone has its own images and theme structure so things will look a bit off.

From the main menu hit "esc" and then you will see some options for tarting up Gemstone.

"Flow Manager" - Setup the flows or views of you media. (Your screenshot is the non Flow recording menu that does not add too much)

"Theme Settings" - From there you have options for selecting different colour highlight sets (the blue outline in your screenshot), menu fonts and settings, transparencies for different elements of the UI, a background manager.

"Widget Manager" - Add widgets for upcoming recordings, recent recordings, drive space, weather, etc...

"Menu Manager" - Hide menu items or rearrange to your liking or use the Metro style menu for here. Very handy for getting rid of menus you don't use (photos, Music etc) and moving menu items around or even adding links to external programs like the Netflix app in a Windows setup. You can even assign backgrounds for each menu from here.

"Utility Functions" - This is where you tell Gemstone to look for fanart (BMT fanart locations) and how to cache it and what sizes etc.

"Weather Setup" - Where you setup the weather provider and select the weather icon set you want to use. You can also install the weather backgrounds (separate plugin to install from repo) and turn them on from here to cycle on the main menu based on current weather.

There are lots of ways to spice things up but you have to dig in a bit to do it. We made it so that you have many options to personalize.

Hopefully this can help get you started.

J

Hell'ava response - thank you !, as I struggle with all of that (I remember seeing the options when having first installed it), can I at least change TO something from the charcoal grey, while I get a chance to play with the rest? I'm not so much into a lot of customizations (I tend to get carried away BIG time).

[jorton]

If you just want to change the grey/black image shut down your client and replace the following image,

"C:\Program Files (x86)\SageTV\SageTV\STVs\SageTV7\Themes\Gemstone\background.jpg"

This will get you started.

J

[RBraverman]

Originally Posted by jorton

If you just want to change the grey/black image shut down your client and replace the following image,

"C:\Program Files (x86)\SageTV\SageTV\STVs\SageTV7\Themes\Gemstone\background.jpg"

This will get you started.

J

YES it did, learned a few things along the way I screwed up everything and then had to crawl out out of what I did.
Many thanks, now if someone can help me with all these plugin's screwing with my head, I'd be REALLY happy, (I started another thread for that).

MANY MANY thanks for the help, the soft blue I used is far more easy on these old eyes.