Is it possible to change the year range of time manager in QGIS?

Question

I have a shapefile with a start and end time field, properly formatted. However my dates range from 1864-1995. When I try to use the shape file with the QGIS time manager plugin I keep getting this message:

An error has occured while executing Python code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/PROGRA~2/Quantum GIS Wroclaw/apps/qgis/./python/plugins\TimeManager
   \timemanagerguicontrol.py", line 342, in updateTimeExtents
    self.dock.horizontalTimeSlider.setMinimum(mktime(timeExtents[0].timetuple()))
ValueError: year out of range

I found that one limitation of time manager is: The range of manageable years is limited due to limitations in time.mktime. The exact range is platform dependent.

Is there a way to find out what the exact range is or change it?

When I tested a sample of my shapefile for 1977 and 1984 they worked fine.

Answer 1

On my Win7 x64, the minimum datetime is 1970-01-01 01:00:00 (mktime returns 0).

A quick and dirty solution is to "shift" the dates into the supported range (over year 1970) by adding a big enough number to the year value.