Transparent Menus

[SeanOffShotgun]

Recently I noticed that when I use the remote control left arrow to return from a playing programme to the Now Playing menu I can see the programme I was just watching on screen in the background of the list - which makes Now Playing a little hard to read.
I thought it had something to do with the fact that I had loaded PETESTRASH's startup animation fix, but then I saw it on a friend's TiVo - this friend has not loaded the fixed startup animation.
It was suggested that this problem might originate from the emulator.
Any thoughts?... anyone?

[Darren King]

That's a weird one. I can tell you from a hardware perspective that the MPEG decoder chip (the one with the IBM logo on it) can overlay on screen text/graphics over a background video but usually what happens is that the background video is one of the animation "loopsets" which are designed not to clash with the on-screen text colours.

Given that you have seen this on two TiVo's suggests it is not a hardware fault but seems that a glitch in the software is causing the last played video not to be replaced with the appropriate loopset.

Why this is I can't say as it is not my area of expertise, but just offering an insight as to how the MPEG decoder chip works in this respect. FWIW I can also vouch that the startup animation fix has nothing to do with this as I have done the change to several TiVo's and not seen the quirk you describe.

[petestrash]

We started this conversation in PM's before this thread.

Another interesting fact is that 'Now Playing' works fine for him when going from 'TiVo Central' to 'Now Playing', it's only clear when going from a show back to 'Now Playing'.

In theory this would mean that both the nowplaying videoclips and loopsets are ok.

I have seen the effect a few times over the years, but rarely repeatable.

It's a software glitch, but I don't have a simple solution for it.

Peter.

[thomson]

There might be a useful error message when the menu is viewed in one of the log files? (kernel, tverr, tvlog and maybe even tivoLog.prv)