Stephen Rowles wrote: > All, > > While at the moment I don't have the time to contribute in terms of > actual coding, I thought that I would put together a list of things I > find difficult or just don't work or I would like to see. This is > intended to help with future development... not to start an argument! > From what I have read many of these issues will be fixed in freevo 2.0, > but I wanted to put these out there for the record. > > I really like freevo, and wouldn't want to go back, but some of the > things on this list make life difficult, especially with non-technical > people trying to use the TV when we have visitors (like parents). Please > note this really isn't a moan, I really like freevo and appreciate all > the hard work people put into it, this is meant in the spirit of > improving things for the future. Is there an appropriate place in the > wiki I could put this info? this might be useful for summer of code type > activities? > All feedback is more than welcome, it lets us see what people really use freevo for and what features they need. There is a wishlist section on the wiki, afaik it's horribly out of date. You could go through it and remove what you know is done and ask the list for anything your unsure of then start updating it again. The wiki is a really important part of freevo as easily accessible and well written documentation is exactly what people like parents and noobs need so I'd strongly encourage you to help out here if you can. > Also, if anyone knows an easy way to solves any of these issues with the > existing 1.x stream, then please let me know :D > I'll try :) > * TV guide is really slow to load :( - would be better if the "timer" > picture was displayed, but spends ages seemingly doing nothing, any > controls pressed are cached during this time so you can end up watching > TV rather than viewing the guide! This is a particular problem when > people use the system for the first time. (note 10 days TV guide for > around 20 channels) > Not sure what's happening here, I have 10 days worth of info for 19 channels and my guide takes about 2.5 seconds to load on an 1.2Ghz athlon and a 7200rpm drive. My TV.xml is 2.6M > * Cannot pause/rewind/fastforward live TV with DVB - I really really > miss this from my old "off the shelf" PVR system > Can you pause a DVB stream in xine standalone? Reason I ask is that you can for ivtv cards by playing the url pvr:// Given that both present a mpeg2 stream I would have thought that you could pause DVB also but maybe not. If you can then it's a matter of someone extending the ivtv_tv plugin to support DVB, you could open a feature request on the tracker for this. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46652 > * Cannot "rewind" recorded TV shows. You can skip back and forward in > large chunks, and I can speed up / slow down the playback, but cannot > rewind. This is incredibly frustrating when you missing something and > just want to wind back a few seconds - again I really miss this from my > old PVR, (I guess this is more of a xine/mplayer issue than freevo). > Yeah that's something that bugs the hell out of me too, afaik it is a limitation of mplayer/xine as you mention which I find hard to believe that they don't have this functionality at this stage. > * Watching TV stops recordings happening, this is very frustrating, more > than once the TV has been switched off, but freevo left running with > live TV, and as a results my recordings haven't happened. My previous > off the shelf PVR popped up a box asking if I wanted to keep watching > with a timeout, if the timeout was reached then the live TV stopped and > recording started. > Easy - just enable the upsoon plugin :) > * After watching TV, returning the the TV guide returns with the guide > at the point you started watching TV (a time which is now in the past), > this causes confusion as programs that appear to be "on now" on other > channels have actually finished, would be great if the TV guide moved > forward to the correct current time. > Not sure how easy this would be to implement in 1.x but you could open a feature request. > * No program info available while viewing a recorded TV program, things > like time remaining, name and summary of the program. > Because of the architecture of freevo this won't be available outside of the 2 branch. > * Application switching to watch video is very slow, I use xine and it > takes ages to start playing video and to get back to the freevo > interface afterwards > This again seems a bit strange to me. Have you tried to debug it? Enable debugging in your local_conf and watch the logs and output with top etc. to try figure out what's happening. > * No ability to "bookmark" tv programs, I often have to stop watching > half way through, would be nice to resume where I left off > Do you mean tv programs or tv recordings? With recordings if you are using mplayer you can use bookmarks, there's a plugin for this, I'm pretty sure it's enabled by default. If you're using xine there was a post to the list a couple of days ago with a patch to enable support. You can apply that or wait for it to be applied to svn or the next release. > * Picture viewer stretches photos - I have a 16:9 wide screen TV, > annoying as people always look fat / thin > Have you tried the panorama skin? This is designed specifically for widescreen TVs. > * Picture viewer, with "slide show" time set, I cannot pause the > playback to look at one photo for longer > Feature request on the tracker. > * Picture viewer, would like an option to random recursive view all > photos - just to do a slide show of everything :), would go nicely with > random play list of my mp3's for background use. > Hmm I've just tried this and there is an option to 'Recursive random play all items' for photos which should do what you want but it appears to only display one random photo from my collection and then never move on. Can you open a bug report on the tracker? > * From recorded show, would be really nice to have "add to favorites", I > sometimes record a program to discover I really like it and want to > record the rest of the series, would be ace to have a menu option to do > this. > Again add a feature request to the tracker :) > * Ability to move / categorise record TV programs - I have a "films" > directory, but I have to manual connect to the box and move films into > this directory when they are recorded. I do this to try and keep the > recorded TV list more manageable. The ability to do this from the freevo > interface, or maybe a facility to save all "films" or other category TV > shows into their own directory would be great. > > You can do most of this if you enable the shoppingcart plugin. You can't create directories from what I remember so you'd have to set up a few by hand first but after that you can copy or move items from one directory to another from inside freevo.
Hope that helps. John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
