Color Channel Logos for My Channel Logos
by Michael Healy @ 11:23 am on April 13th, 2009 in tv listings with 20 Comments
My Channel Logos is a great program that allows you to add channel logos to your TV guide listings in Windows 7 Media Center. Unfortunately, by default My Channel Logos only includes white/blue channel logos for use with the program. What if you want to add color logos to your TV guide listings? It’s possible to create and add them to your channel listings yourself.
These icons look especially good on Astroytoy7’s black theme who has also created a small pack of premade color channel icons which you can download from the Australian Media Center Community Forums. For even more pre-made icon sets visit the brand new Color Icon Download Page on Hack7MC too!
First you’ll need to get color versions of the channel logos for your channel lineup. A good resource for downloading channel logos can be found at iconharmony.com. To download logos select the 8xx option from the front page then select the checkbox next to each channel in your lineup. Once you’ve got your channels selected press the “Zip Icons” button to get a zip file containing your channel logos. You’re limited to 48 icons per zip file so you may need more than one zip to fit all of your icons from the site.
We’ll need to edit the logos slightly to create transparent backgrounds for them as well. You’ll need an image editing program such as paint.net to edit the images for use in Media Center. Extract the images to your hard drive and then, using paint.net, open each one. The black background will need to be removed on each logo.
Use the magic wand tool to select the black area of each logo and hit delete. There should now be a grey and white background to the logo which indicates a transparent area. Now save the logo as a .png file, by default images downloaded from iconharmony.com are .jpg so you will need to change the file type when saving.
Now open Windows Explorer and navigate to the My Channel Logos directory in Program Files (or Program Files x86 on 64-bit machines). Inside the My Channel Logos folder should be another folder named “Logos”. This folder contains all the channel logos used in the TV guide. You will need to locate the logo you’re replacing and name the color logo with the same filename as the original My Channel Logos file.
If you have run My Channel Logos before, you can navigate to “\ProgramData\MyChannelLogos” instead to replace the existing channel logos. Otherwise, you’ll need to repopulate the logos using the My Channel Logos program.
Replace the original white logo with the new color logo and run My Chanel Logos to make sure the new color logo is being loaded correctly. Alternatively, you can also assign each color logo from inside My Channel Logos manually. That’s all there is to it! This will take some work to complete but for those looking for color channel logos it’s worth the effort.
Even better! Created a bunch of color channel icons for your area? Upload it to Hack7MC and share it with others on the Color Channel Logo download page.
