Attn joey, and themers.. a little advice needed again please.

[mannymiller]

just lately i have been playing around with theme front ends. trying to find a style / colour combo that i like,  so that i can produce a theme. most of the frontends have had png overlays on one sheet.. and file size / navigation hasnt been an issue.

i did notice on devicious theme the main pages were over 1 meg  each and made the menu quite sluggish. on the latest version they were reduced to around 100k. and certainly made a difference.  now i have 7 front pages all in .png format, and each around 500 - 600k in size. im trying to reduce them in size.. and not having much joy.

any help much appreciated.. oh and im using photoshop.

[JoeySmyth · Accepted solution]

@ mannymiller

It's a "Trick" i used with my "Aeonish Hub" Theme ... which i forwarded the info onto Devicous in a PM

(I have explained it previously in the Aeonish Hub Thread .... somewhere in there of the 87 Pages)

This is my  PM and The Explanation and Solution:

Tried out your Black Mamba Home Screen, looks great ! but is slow due to use of PNGs (which are over a Mbyte)

My Aeonish Home Screen is using JPG compressed as much as possible before artifacts appear... and then simply renaming the file extension to PNG.

Which the Hub is quite happy to read and display .... and is faster due to smaller filesize  (kinda the 'reverse' of the PNG to JPG trick)

[flhthemi]

Well now that it's out, I guess WD's programmers will "fix" this.

[mannymiller]

lmao @ flhthemi

Thanks joey. i knew that worked on moviesheets. ie png to jpg.. didnt know it would work the other way round. your a star again, thanks

[JoeySmyth]

@flhthemi

It's an "Old" Trick i used with the WDTV Gen1 and Live ... worked with every  Revision and Works with Every Live Hub Revision.. so far

P.S.  Aeonish Hub "List View" ?  i used a JPG renamed to PNG for the Scroll Bar ...

My Modding Rule.. "If it aint Transparent or Rounded Corners"  then use a JPEG ... smaller and faster.

and "Filenames" are  very important for  'Speed'  another trick,  that a long time ago somebody  'debunked'

But i can prove it ... actually i have ... with Aeonish Hub  

[architectonic]

@Joey

Thanks for the reminder on this old trick. Was experiencing same sort of problems with some of my graphics in my theme.

[DeVicious]

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architectonic wrote:

@Joey

Thanks for the reminder on this old trick. Was experiencing same sort of problems with some of my graphics in my theme.

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before Joey told me about it I was "optimizing my code" and set my hub into an infinite reboot loob due to crashing, which made me notice that I lost my USB to USB cable when I moved, muahaha took me a long time to find that 15 seconds window where your network connection is established during a reboot / crash to upload the new home.xml

[JoeySmyth]

Another way, if your Hub goes into an infinate reboot due to editing the home.xml

Just simply  keep tapping the 'Setup' button your Remote while it's rebooting and it boot to the

Default Mochi Theme, then you can fix the home.xml and re-apply your theme.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/Be-Carefull-Editing-Home-XML-S/td-p/146450

[DeVicious]

in order for that i need a setup button

I am having a Logitech Harmony remote, it controls several devices at the same time, i have assigned the setup button for another device, but thanx for the info I will add me this function now :-)

[flhthemi]

Dev, I have a Harmony 880. It has a small LCD screen for "Additional Buttons" I programmed one of them for "Setup" In the "Activity" I use to watch the Hub. I don't know which Harmony remote you have but maybe you could do something similar?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B001HA51Z6/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&s=miscellaneous

Great remote by the way!