Dnia 2009-06-30, wto o godzinie 10:57 -0700, Kevin Fox pisze: > On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 10:15 -0700, Michał Sawicz wrote: > > Dnia 2009-06-30, wto o godzinie 16:48 +0200, David McLeod pisze: > <SNIP> > > > > Actually if LiveTV is more important than recorded shows is debatable. > > According to #mythtv-users most of the users set in their MythTV setup > > rarely use LiveTV. They have so much recordings set up they don't have > > the time to watch live. Of course the ability to watch a show > > currently > > being recorded is needed, too. The usual PVR does never show a > > completely 'Live' TV. It's always a recording, just a recording of > > what > > is currently broadcasted. This, in turn, allows for all the use cases > > you've described. > > This is how I use it.
Yeah me too, mostly. Only recently my hw got dodgy on me and does not record most of my schedules correctly. > > What we really need, IMO, is a new way to do EPG. The stale old table > > of > > channels vs. time is soooo 90s. We need to leverage the abilities > > Moovida provides us with in terms of UX and design. I'm not saying I > > know what to do, I don't even have a set idea of what could we do, I > > just want us to brainstorm here. > > I usually use Myth's search feature rather then the channel vs time for > this. Yeah search is important, but some kind of EPG could be useful, too. > > Another thing is channel hierarchy. I don't think a flat list digs it > > now that we have hundreds if not thousands of channels available. > > Again, this is one of the reasons to not bother with live tv. What I > want to do is watch the shows I want to watch, not "tune to channel 107 > at 5:30pm". You let the PVR do all of that. > > I think the EPG should be designed around letting you pick what you want > to watch. Sort by Genre of show, similar shows to what you like, etc and > then let you schedule recordings easily. Still, most users that start with PVRs don't get it from start so we need to allow that, too. > > I > > think the ability to arbitrarily set up a tree of channels (where the > > same channel can show up in different branches) would allow for easy > > and > > user-defined grouping by service provider, channel type (movies / > > sports / news), favorites etc. > > I think thats probably too confining. I'd take your 90's comment and > apply it to channels entirely. The SciFi channel for example plays > science fiction and and sometimes fantasy. Say I was a Scifi nut but > didn't like fantasy. If the tree was more like: > > Sports/All > Sports/Football > Sports/Basketball > Science Fiction > Fantasy > Drama/All > Drama/Some kind of hospital show series > > Etc. > > I could just select based on what I liked. That's why I wanted it to be completely user-defined. You want it this way? Good, have it your way. > > I know that 'Watch TV' is the usual way to start watching - just jump > > to > > the last watched channel. I find myself doing that even if I want to > > watch something else, I then have to wait for the channel to lock and > > start playing before I can switch to a different channel I actually > > want > > to watch. > > I hardly ever do that. I still do, sometimes. > > That would, probably, be easier as the backend side of things is > > complete. On the other hand Myth is recently getting a rehaul and we > > can't be sure what will the future bring. > > One of my biggest complaints with them though has been how far apart > their stable / devel branches get. Its years before then release. > > But, this means if you always target the stable release for your client, > your pretty safe. It is definitely not a moving target. :) I may be biased, but that's just because I'm left with using Myth even when I don't like it. Most of the ideas they have are great, but IMO Myth is so big a lump it needs a rewrite. And that's what Moovida's here for ;P > > The thing to notice here is > > that there's completely no alternative UIs for MythTV anywhere. I > > think > > there's a reason. > > I think its because their UI is deceptively simple looking. Once you dig > into trying to implement it elsewhere you find a lot of little, great > features, that are hard to implement in whatever client your trying to > bind to it. Deception is a good word :D > For example, commercial skip. I have it set on by default. It works 9 > times out of 10. The 10th time, I can just hit back a couple of times or > forward a couple of times and get past the issue. Or, I can hit 'E', > bring up the commercial skip list editor and fix the issue, so next time > I watch that recording its fixed. If I tell it to burn the show to a > DVD, I can have it use that same cut list that I ensured was correct > right in the client, and burn to the disk cropping out the commercials. Yes, editing is great, simple and effective. > If I'm watching a live stream, and the scheduler wants to use the tuner, > it prompts me if I want to let the scheduler have it. If I don't respond > in time, it just takes it. Yeah I sometimes have problems with that, it sometimes does not ask and hangs the frontend. And where's the 'Record and watch as it records' option gone? > Or a big one, all the metadata related to a show. They way they order > things, if you have 30 different episodes of the simpsons recorded, You > can easily look through them, get a short/long description and find one > you want to watch and ignore the ones you don't. I've seen very few > media clients that do that well. Grouping by series / season name is something we already have and as discussed earlier, we could easily integrate it with current TV Show menus. > > I'm also not sure about Gstreamer's ability to play / rewind > > files saved by MythTV, my quick tests show that playing the file > > directly or through a mythv:// URI does give me playback, but > > rewinding > > is only possible for files that have stopped recording. > > We'd need to fix up gstreamers codec then. Which would be harder, > rewriting mythbackend from scratch, or fixing a slightly broken > codec? :) > > Also, having this codec fixed helps for other reasons. No matter what, I > still have lots of NUV encoded stuff laying around. Yeah but it's a niche, I don't believe there's a proper container ready for this kind of use. > > > > The other method is to use Gnome DVBD, this means providing our > > own > > > > code for TV streaming, interfacing with GDVBD's EPG or using an > > > > outside source (preferable). Also this means writing our own code > > > > for things like recording, schedules, expiration, ad skipping, and > > > > possibly alot more. > > I think this is pretty hard to do well. It took Myth a long time to get > all of that usable. We can learn from them, simplify and improve even further. One of the most important features of Moovida is simplicity. > > >From discussions we already had on IRC the easiest way to integrate > > with > > GDVBD would be to use UPnP. We would need to extend the protocol but > > that, according to Frank Scholz (d...@#elisa,#coherence), the core > > developer behind Coherence, should not be too difficult. > > This sounds like a good idea to me. It would be nice for my PS3 as > well. :) Yeah that's an additional gain. > > One BIG drawback of GDVBD is that AFAIK it's currently DVB-only, -- Michał Sawicz <[email protected]>
