There has been some trains on this lately but I wanted to run some ideas passed the alias to see if they seem to hang together. I may well go ahead and prototype this anyway to see how the UI looks and feels; but wanted to flush out ideas first.
This is meant to fix two things: better integration between plugins, and getting rid of dead-time in the main menu. By the last point I mean; to go from TV to music you have to exit TV then enter music. The bit in between is dead-time - the user experiences no content and it detracts from the user experience. I would like to see the "Menu" button call up a common menu regardless of where in Myth the user is. This would be a on-screen menu like the MythTV OSD menu, and would be context sensitive such that hitting Menu in Live-TV would result in entering the menu at a level that has relevant actions; but hitting up-menu would go back to TV where you could switch to Music etc. Then without the main screen changing from watching TV, you could look at music playlists etc. I imagine one or two levels of fixed menu items, then a set of dynamic menus. A new plugin function, something like get_osd_menu(), would be called when the user hits "right" at a menu prompt to build the next menu layer. As an example; within "MythMusic" I could hit menu, then left, select TV, then Live-TV which could then give me a menu of channels created dynamically by calling the mythtv-plugin (I know, it isnt a plugin, but you get what I mean). Then I could switch straight from listening to music to watching BBC1 without "dead-time". Problems I see implementing this: ideally it would be implemented within Mythfrontend without heavy impact to each plugin; but it may be that each plugin needs to capture the "menu" key and call a libmyth function; then pass all subsequent keystrokes to it. Also, a mix of OSD-type displays and QT-type displays adds complexity. Welcome any thoughts. Paul _______________________________________________ mythtv-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev
