[mythtv] Parameters to modules?

[Mark Hetherington]

I Have just recently checked out of svn ("trunk"?) and everything seems to be 
running smoothly, except I had some wierdness with opengl transitions in 
mythgallery (it may be my system), just flickered a bit and then blank 
screen. 

Interesting to see some quite noticeable changes (netflix?), unfortunately I 
have some issues with my tv card at the moment, (Missing the plug from the 
card itself to the backplane....) so I'm only able to test the other 
functions at the moment.

Anyway, one thing that has struck me as a bit of a usability issue (at least 
on my file collection) is that is very hard to use the "video manager" on a 
large number of files, with a mix between tv series files and movies. It 
takes a long while to fish through heaps of tv show episodes to get just the 
movies, to get the covers off IMDB. 

I guess what I was thinking of was separating the browsing of movies, and the 
browsing of tv shows. for example, using the gallery to browse just movies 
(with cover images, which is very cool), and using a hierarchical menu to 
browse the tv shows. Currently I just set all the movies to browseable, and 
the TV shows to not browsable and look for movies in the "Browse videos" 
option, and use the "video list" for everything else.

What struck me as an easy way to extend the functionality was to be able to 
pass in a "base directory" parameter to the mythvideo module, and put it in 
the menu twice, once with the "/movies/" parameter (under a menu option 
"movies", and once with "/TV Shows/", so it would only display the files from 
that directory. I figure this would be a fairly easy change, but I wasn't 
sure if it's possible to pass runtime parameters into the modules based on 
menu options.

I'm happy to (try, probably slowly) to make a patch for this, but I didn't 
think I'd want to change to interface to all the modules, so I was hoping 
they already accept a parameter string or something. I guess also it would be 
good to know if anyone else is either interested in this sort of function, or 
if there is a better way to do it currently?

In any case, happy mything all!
redcane