Service Reference Picons:
Originally, picons (the graphics that are used to identify channels) were the service reference variety (SRP). A service reference is something like “1_0_1_2EE_906_2210_EEEE01DA_0_0_0”. So all that was done was display the picon whose filename matched the service reference of the channel. Great!!!, but two problems. The service reference is made up of orbital position, frequency, transponder and identifier… so if the channel moves to a new frequency or identifier, the picon filename no longer corresponds and the picon is not displayed. And the second problem is the filename is not easily human readable. The first point above also means Service Reference Picons are no good for streams and IPTV, either because the refs are not unique, or because the refs change frequently (sometimes every few hours, or even on every zap in some cases).
Service Name Picons ( https://world-of-satellite.com/threads/picons-snp-service-name-picons.41785/ ):
Instead of using the service reference for the picon filename, the channel name is used instead, but at that time these were conceived it was decided to only allow lowercase ASCII letter and number characters. i.e. a-z and 0-9. All other characters, spaces, symbols, etc. were sent to the dustbin. ( https://github.com/OpenViX/enigma2/commit/cc963cd25d7e1c58701f55aa4b382e525031966e ) This approach allowed for frequency and identifier changes and still continued to work, and was human readable. The problem with Service Name Picons is that the algorithm only allows a-z and 0-9 and no other characters. This is ok for channels that use the western alphabet without accents or special chars but not for Arabic ( اسم قناتي ) or Bulgarian ( Диема ХД ) or even western European ( Áèíöúñ ).
UTF-8 Service Name Picons:
UTF-8 is a character encoding system, created in 1993, that can represent more that one million characters. UTF-8 has become the de facto standard and today almost all webpages worldwide use this encoding. You can read more about it on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 ). Also, UTF-8 is the default encoding in Python 3 (which all images have now migrated to) and the characters are fully compatible with the Linux file system, so it makes sense for enigma to now accept this format, which it already does. So now the channel "Диема ХД" can have a picon with the filename “диема хд.png”. This type of picons are already in the feeds (packages marked utf8snp) and should be compatible with OpenViX images > 6.6. The picon packs on the feeds are built from https://github.com/picons/picons so any problems with the packages should be reported there.
Originally, picons (the graphics that are used to identify channels) were the service reference variety (SRP). A service reference is something like “1_0_1_2EE_906_2210_EEEE01DA_0_0_0”. So all that was done was display the picon whose filename matched the service reference of the channel. Great!!!, but two problems. The service reference is made up of orbital position, frequency, transponder and identifier… so if the channel moves to a new frequency or identifier, the picon filename no longer corresponds and the picon is not displayed. And the second problem is the filename is not easily human readable. The first point above also means Service Reference Picons are no good for streams and IPTV, either because the refs are not unique, or because the refs change frequently (sometimes every few hours, or even on every zap in some cases).
Service Name Picons ( https://world-of-satellite.com/threads/picons-snp-service-name-picons.41785/ ):
Instead of using the service reference for the picon filename, the channel name is used instead, but at that time these were conceived it was decided to only allow lowercase ASCII letter and number characters. i.e. a-z and 0-9. All other characters, spaces, symbols, etc. were sent to the dustbin. ( https://github.com/OpenViX/enigma2/commit/cc963cd25d7e1c58701f55aa4b382e525031966e ) This approach allowed for frequency and identifier changes and still continued to work, and was human readable. The problem with Service Name Picons is that the algorithm only allows a-z and 0-9 and no other characters. This is ok for channels that use the western alphabet without accents or special chars but not for Arabic ( اسم قناتي ) or Bulgarian ( Диема ХД ) or even western European ( Áèíöúñ ).
UTF-8 Service Name Picons:
UTF-8 is a character encoding system, created in 1993, that can represent more that one million characters. UTF-8 has become the de facto standard and today almost all webpages worldwide use this encoding. You can read more about it on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 ). Also, UTF-8 is the default encoding in Python 3 (which all images have now migrated to) and the characters are fully compatible with the Linux file system, so it makes sense for enigma to now accept this format, which it already does. So now the channel "Диема ХД" can have a picon with the filename “диема хд.png”. This type of picons are already in the feeds (packages marked utf8snp) and should be compatible with OpenViX images > 6.6. The picon packs on the feeds are built from https://github.com/picons/picons so any problems with the packages should be reported there.
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