Category: Multimedia

Change the Kodi TV Guide / Programme Listing Font Size under Kodi 17 / Krypton

C:Amie/ / Multimedia, Software

System Requirements:

  • Kodi Krypton, 17.0, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 17.4

The Problem:

If you are a Kodi user, you will have no doubt noticed that with the change in version from 16 to 17, the XBMB Foundation changed the default skin from Confluence to Estuary. While Estuary is a nice looking skin, with Kodi 17, the programme has become more limited in the font customisation’s that are available through the skin/UI settings menu. Where as under previous versions, you had some pre-defined normal, large, extra large style choices, under version 17 all you can do is switch between default font and the system default font under the guise of it having higher legibility.

If your use case is such that you have a TV that is a long way away, or more importantly, if you need to support a user with accessibility needs who relied on Kodi’s ability to resize the text size in order to navigation the system, then you are somewhat out of luck at the current time.

This article outlines how to change the font size on the Kodi TV Guide/Programme Listings page by modifying the UI skin configuration files directly. It is also intended as a very high level illustration of how to modify other UI elements.

The Fix

The process of changing the font size is fairly easy, one you know what you are doing. The process of changing the font size is a three step process

  1. Find the correct configuration file
  2. Establish what your legal parameter values are
  3. Edit the configuration file in the correct place

Find the correct configuration file

The Estuary skin configuration and interface files are located at .\addons\skin.estuary\, relative to the install path. For example, on Windows, this is most likely:

C:Program Files (x86)\Kodi\addons\skin.estuary\

The key repository that you need to review is the xml folder (C:Program Files (x86)\Kodi\addons\skin.estuary\xml\).

In this folder, you will find the layout parameter files for Kodi. For the purposes of this guide, the file that we need to edit is MyPVRGuide.xml. You need to identify the correct file for the section that you want to edit in order to proceed.

If you are running Windows and User Account Control (UAC) is enabled, copy the file to your desktop and then make a backup copy of it. If you try and edit the fire directly under Program Files (x86) you will get an access denied error when you attempt to save the changes.

Establish what your legal parameter values are

Note: If you just want to edit the font and don’t care about the ‘how’, you can skip this section. Just realise that you cannot put any value that you want in the font size field when editing the skin.

For the font size, Kodi does not use an integer or point value for the font size (12, 36, 48 etc). Instead, it uses an XML enumerable type definition in its DTD representing allowed values. This means that you need to know what the allows values are and that if you want to use a non-standard value, you have to perform a far more complex series of edits to allow Kodi to support a new font size. As this change is something that you will likely need to make every time Kodi receives an official update, I strongly advise not attempting to create your own DTD value and consequently how to do it will remain beyond the scope of this article.

In order to ascertain what the allowed values are, I used a Command Prompt string search to look for all instances of “>font” under the XML folder.

The following command

findstr /s /l ^>font "c:\Program Files (x86)\Kodi\addons\skin.estuary\xml\*.xml"

Yielded the following block of definitions after de-duplication

<name>font10</name>
<name>font12</name>
<name>font13</name>
<name>font14</name>
<name>font25_narrow</name>
<name>font27</name>
<name>font27_narrow</name>
<name>font37</name>
<name>font45</name>
<name>font60</name>
<name>font_clock</name>
<name>font_flag</name>
<name>font20_title</name>
<name>font25_title</name>
<name>font30_title</name>
<name>font32_title</name>
<name>font36_title</name>
<name>font45_title</name>
<name>font52_title</name>
<name>font_MainMenu</name>

These fontXXXXXX values represent the allowed enumerate values that the skin ill accept. Anything else will be ignored and substituted with a default (font12).

Edit the configuration file in the correct place

Go back to the skin .xml file you copied to your desktop. Open the file in Notepad or your preferred text editor.

You now need to find the section that controls the UI element that you want to modify. Read through it looking for clues in the XML naming and if all else fails, it is a case of trial and error to find it (unless you want to go and read the Kodi skin documentation).

If you want to edit the TV Guide programme listing entry under Kodi 17.4, then look for the following section:

<itemlayout height="62" width="60">
<control type="image" id="2">
<width>58</width>
<height>58</height>
<texture border="3" fallback="windows/pvr/epg-genres/0.png">$INFO[ListItem.Property(GenreType),windows/pvr/epg-genres/,.png]</texture>
</control>
<control type="label" id="1">
<left>6</left>
<top>0</top>
<width>50</width>
<height>36</height>
<aligny>center</aligny>
<font>font12</font>
<label>$INFO[ListItem.Label]</label>
</control>
<control type="image">
<left>6</left>
<top>35</top>
<width>20</width>
<height>20</height>
<texture>$VAR[PVRTimerIcon]</texture>
</control>
</itemlayout>

The <font>font12</font> line controls the text size. In the use case that I had, I found that changing it to <font>font30_title</font> was acceptable. Remember: You can only use one of the lookup values shown in the section above and as this is XML, it is case sensitive!

Change the value, save the file and copy it back to the XML folder. Now (re)start Kodi to view your changes.

If you edit this value, you will notice that when you highlight the programme in the TV guide, the highlight goes back to a smaller font size, while non-highlighted programme’s will display in the new, larger font size. This is because the highlight is controlled by a different section. To change the highlight, go back to the .xml file in Notepad and edit the following section accordingly:

<focusedchannellayout height="62" width="350">
<control type="label">
<left>2</left>
<top>-2</top>
<width>75</width>
<height>60</height>
<font>font12</font>
<label>$INFO[ListItem.ChannelNumberLabel]</label>
<textcolor>button_focus</textcolor>
<align>center</align>
<aligny>center</aligny>
</control>
<control type="label" id="1">
<left>68</left>
<top>-2</top>
<width>350</width>
<height>60</height>
<font>font12</font>
<label>$INFO[ListItem.ChannelName]</label>
<textcolor>button_focus</textcolor>
<aligny>center</aligny>
<textoffsetx>10</textoffsetx>
</control>
</focusedchannellayout>

Note: in version 17.4 this is immediately ABOVE the section you just edited!

Change font12 to match your new value, save, put the file back in the XML folder and (re)start Kodi. The highlight font size should now match the rest of the Programme Guide.

Once you know where to go, the process it fairly easy. Do keep pin mind though that when you update Kodi to a new version, it will overwrite your changes and you will need to go back in and edit the font sizes once again. Hopefully the XBMC UI team will get around to restoring some degree of internal configurability for this soon, as not everyone in this world has 20:20 vision!

Hyper-V Discrete Device Assignment (DDA) with a TV Tuner (Hauppauge HVR-4400)

C:Amie/ / Hardware, Hyper-V, Multimedia

System Requirements:

  • Windows Server 2016
  • Hauppauge HVR-4400 PCIe Tuner

The Problem:

I am a DVBLink user. DVBLink does not play nicely with Windows Service and consequently it wants to run on a client OS. This means that I have lots of server hardware running server Operating Systems and one device with 4 TV Tuners in it running Windows 10.

With the release of Windows Server 2016 came the promise of VMWare like PCIe Pass-through, allowing physical devices on the PCI bus to be attached to VMs. The plan is to attach the PCIe TV Tuner and attempt to get DVBLink working in a VM so that the physical unit can be decommissioned (saving the power bill).

More Info

As part of the process, I was considering building a new server at the start of 2017 to perform a consolidation against. The Windows 10 DVBLink machine would be one consolidated devices onto more powerful modern hardware. I would also need new TV Tuners as only 2 of the 4 in the DVBLink TV Server is PCIe, the rest are PCI. Again, there are opportunities to consolidate that into fewer PCIe devices too.

The driver for the new server was Hyper-V PCIe Pass-through, or “Discrete Device Assignment” (DDA) as Microsoft are calling it. It is however quite difficult to find out whether BIOS firmware supports the proper implementations of I/O-MMU VT-d to permit it, making the purchase a risk. Equally, there is no guarantee that DDA will work with a TV Tuner.

Consequently, I decided to borrow a dual CPU Dell PowerEdge R630 to perform the experiment as there were several reports on-line that the R6xx and R7xx have the proper VT-d and SR-IOV feature set for this type of activity. Well done Dell (why don’t you advertise this?!).

After updating firmware, adding the TV Tuner and installing Windows Hyper-V Server 2016 on the machine, the first step was to – as an experiment – attempt to install the TV Tuner drivers on Windows Server 2016 (which errored). After that it was time to run the DDA Survey Script from Microsoft.

Download: DDA Survey Script (GitHub)

 

This was promising. The script found two devices that it stated were capable of being used with DDA

PERC H730 Mini
Express Endpoint -- more secure.
And its interrupts are message-based, assignment can work.
PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0100)#PCI(0000)

and

Hauppauge WinTV HVR-4400 (Model 121xxx, Hybrid DVB-T/S2, IR)
Express Endpoint -- more secure.
And it has no interrupts at all -- assignment can work.
PCIROOT(0)#PCI(0200)#PCI(0000)

The next step was to dismount the device from the Hypervisor and make it available to Hyper-V

# Find the HVR-4400
$pnpdevs = Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object {$_.Class -eq "Media"} | Where-Object {$_.Service -eq "HCW85BDA"}# ... or if you know the hardware ID
$pnpdevs = Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object {$_.InstanceId -eq "PCI\VEN_14F1&DEV_888
0&SUBSYS_C1080070&REV_04\4&39CDA168&0&0010"}foreach ($pnpdev in $pnpdevs) {
Disable-PnpDevice -InstanceId $pnpdev.InstanceId -Confirm:$false
Write-Host 'Device ' $pnpdev.InstanceId ' Disabled. NOTE: If this hangs, reboot and try again'
$instanceId = $pnpdev.InstanceId
$locationpath = ($pnpdev | get-pnpdeviceproperty DEVPKEY_Device_LocationPaths).data[0]
Write-Host 'Dismounting Device At: ' $locationpath ' (' $instanceId ')'
Dismount-VmHostAssignableDevice -locationpath $locationpath
Write-Host $locationpath
}

Initially, it hung PowerShell (and the system) so I had to hard reset the server. In this instance it was in fact necessary to reboot after issuing

Disable-PnpDevice

After trying again and rebooting the Dismount-VmHostAssignableDevice failed with

dismount-vmhostassignabledevice : The operation failed.
The manufacturer of this device has not supplied any directives for securing this device while exposing it to a
virtual machine. The device should only be exposed to trusted virtual machines.
This device is not supported when passed through to a virtual machine.
The operation failed.
The manufacturer of this device has not supplied any directives for securing this device while exposing it to a
virtual machine. The device should only be exposed to trusted virtual machines.
This device is not supported and has not been tested when passed through to a virtual machine. It may or may not
function. The system as a whole may become unstable. The device should only be exposed to trusted virtual machines.
At line:1 char:1

It would not proceed past this point. The trick was to change the line to

Dismount-VmHostAssignableDevice -locationpath $locationpath -Force

The next step was to ensure that the VM’s Automatic Stop Action was set to anything other than “Save”

Set-VM -Name “10-TEST” -AutomaticStopAction Shutdown

… and at this point it was simply a case of creating a VM and assigning the device

Add-VMAssignableDevice -LocationPath “$locationpath” -VMName “10-Test”

At which point the device immediately popped up in Device Manager under Windows 10 in the Generation 2 VM

DDA PCIe Passthrough in Device Manager

…. before the VM blue screened a few seconds later.

Blue Screen of Death

I tried to use several versions of the HVR-4400 driver that I could find and it made no difference. The VM would crash whenever it attempted to talk to the card. The Hypervisor itself did not seem to be impacted by the Blue Screen event and itself did not crash.

I also tried fully removing the device from the Hypervisor using DEVCON and clearing out the driver using pnputil. Superficially, this action made it worse as the VM wouldn’t boot at all now if it had a driver on-file for the TV Tuner. Before it would at least boot.

So this project was a failure and I will not be investing in new server hardware just yet. I’ll wait to see if Microsoft improve the feature set as allegedly this type of insanity (and yes, it is insane) is possible in VMWare. I do not want to change away from Hyper-V at the current time though, so I will have to stick with a client machine as a service.

This does not mean of course that this cannot work in Hyper-V. The HVR-4400 is a card from 2011/2012. So it is not exactly new hardware. PCIe TV Tuners designed to modern electrical standards and for use on PCIe 3.0 bus architectures may provide better interoperability out of the box. I just don’t have any other cards to test with and am in a bit of a chicken and egg situation over wanting to invest in new cards and servers unless I know they will work nicely together.

If you are interested in this too and would like me to have a go testing your hardware, please get in touch via HPC:Factor.

Performing WUSU 3.0 database maintenance (database re-indexing) via WsusDBMaintenance under Windows Server 2008

C:Amie/ / Multimedia, Software, Windows Server

System Requirements:

  • Windows Software Update Services 3.0
  • Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2

The Problem:

Microsoft recommend that you perform monthly maintenance on your WSUS database to keep it in good order. The following pages represent the instruction for undertaking this activity

This document simply seeks to clarify the process when using Windows Internal Database (instead of SQL Server) under Windows Server 2008/R2.

The Fix

The following summarises the steps involved in the process.

  1. Install the SQL Server Native Client for your processor on the WSUS server
  2. Install the SQLCmd utility for your processor on the WSUS server
  3. Copy & Paste the T-SQL code from Re-index the WSUS 3.0 Database into a notepad file and save it on c:\ as WsusDBMaintenance.sql (or download here)

If you wish to automate or schedule the task:

  1. Create a .cmd file on your desktop
  2. Enter the following into it
"c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\sqlcmd.exe" -I -i"c:\WsusDbMaintenance.sql" -S "np:\\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query"
  1. Note that the version of the SQL Server SQLCmd that you install will need to be reflected in the version number (90 above). 90 = SQL Server 2005, 100 = SQL Server 2008 and so on.
  2. Right click the .cmd file and select “Run as Administrator” to launch it through an elevated command prompt
  3. If you setup a scheduled task for this, remember to set the always run with full permissions option.

If you just want to run it once:

  1. Open an elevated command prompt
  2. Enter the command:
"c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\sqlcmd.exe" -I -i"c:\WsusDbMaintenance.sql" -S "np:\\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query"
  1. Note that the version of the SQL Server SQLCmd that you install will need to be reflected in the version number (90 above). 90 = SQL Server 2005, 100 = SQL Server 2008 and so on.

Cannot install the integrated audio AC97′ hardware from a Asus P4S333 or P4S533 under Windows Vista

C:Amie/ / Hardware, Multimedia

System Requirements:

  • Windows Vista SP1
  • Windows Server 2008

The Problem:

So, you get fed-up of trying to get PCI sound cards working under Vista and opted for the integrated sound CPU clogging solution?! I don’t blame you.

The P4S333 may be old kit, but it’s a solid motherboard, very much Vista capable with the right upper end P4 and enough RAM, particularly if you flashed the P4S333 with the P4S533’s BIOS to make use of the 533 MHz FSB. The difficulty we have is however in that the C-Media CMI8738 AC97′ chip that the board uses cannot be matched to any of Windows Updates hardware ID’s and Asus, naturally, do not offer a Vista driver.

More Information:

Thankfully, C-Media do provide generic drivers, and there is a January 2009 driver release for the CMI8738 as of writing. The driver does work once you get it out of the RAR file, however:

  1. The driver does not have the necessary hardware ID to install automatically against the customised chip on the P4S333 / P4S533
  2. The driver is not digitally signed

Despite that, I’ve not seen any problems with it, and despite the CPU connotations, it got rid of irritating buzzing that the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 was causing with the useless Vista driver set.

The Fix

Very simply, you need to manually install the driver.

  1. Download the latest CMI8738 driver from C-Media (http://www.cmedia.com.tw/). As of writing the driver version was 8.17.33 and it worked a treat
  2. Deflate the RAR into the file system
  3. Open the Control Panel
  4. Open the Device Manager
  5. Find the uninstalled multimedia device in the Other Devices section, right click, Update Driver Software
  6. Click Browse my computer for driver software
  7. Click let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer
  8. Hit the have disk button
  9. Browse to the path that you inflated the RAR file to, for example if you inflated the RAR file to c:\temp\ you want to browse to the following location:
    c:\temp\PCI-8738-090109-8.17.33(Vista3264-RC-01)\SoftwareDriver\driverNote that if the driver version you are using is newer, then the version in the file name will clearly be different. Ultimately however you are looking to point to the SoftwareDriver\driver folder (there are several INF’s and some CAT files in here)
  10. In the manufacturer list from the available select:
    C-Media
  11. From the Model list select:
    C-Media PCI Audio Device
  12. Click Next
  13. Windows will notify you that the driver has not been digitally signed. You’re going to have to tough this one out I’m afraid and install it.
  14. At that point the audio should just start working.