I’m pleased to announce the 0.1.1 release of the MythStatusScreenlet. This release now is “theme-able”. I know Screenlets are theme-able already, but the standard theme support really just supports changing the background and other externally loaded graphics (png and svg). UPDATE: It appears I am running an old version of screenlets (0.0.14) and versions 0.1.2 and above have a lot more theme support.

In MythStatusScreenlet 0.1.1, I’ve extended (subclassed) the Screenlets utils.ini_reader to load extra options for the theme. These options control the layout and style of all the elements of the MythStatusScreenlet. As a proof of concept, I’ve quickly built a few other themes including “mythbuntu” and “glass”. I’ve renamed the default mepo theme to mepo-transparent, and created a new one for mepo that has a black background. This is because of a comment on the download page saying that a user sometimes found it hard to see the screenlet when backgrounds were changed.

Additionally, there is now support for GTK popups using the Screenlets Notifier class. The MythStatusScreenlet will popup a Notifier window when MythTV starts or finishes a recording.

I’ve tried to add mouseover tooltips too. However, I’ve found it to be quite unreliable, so it’s turned off by default.

I recently built a new MythTV machine. I installed mythbuntu 8.04 on it, which installed MythTv 0.21  Since then, my myth box no longer presents the Temperature information. I suspect a few other people might have the same problem (based on a comment on the gnome-look site), so I’ve fixed the code to only try and display the Temperature information if it is present. However, this means that I can’t easily test the Temperature display when building the themes. Please post a comment if you have this working, or have problems with it. Does anyone know if Temperature info is no longer presented in Myth 0.21, or is it a MythBuntu thing?

As usual, downloads are at gnome-look.

As mentioned on the MythStatus screenlet page, I’ve tidied up some of the code and posted a tar on the Screenlets Website.

The MythStatus Screenlet polls the XML info page of MythTV’s backend (normally port 6544), and parses the XML information to display the status of your backend. It shows the next ten upcoming recordings, highlighting in red, any that are currently recording.

It also shows Last Guide Update status, a disk space graph, Load Average and Temperature as provided by MythTV’s XML status page.