[mythtv] Thoughts on Myth UI

Paul Volkaerts paul.volkaerts at lineone.net
Fri Dec 24 00:45:26 UTC 2004


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







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