[mythtv-users] Remotes, irxevent and menu navigation

[Edward Wildgoose]

> Personally I must say that maybe we should try to find a VERY limited
> set of actions and "force" module writers to at least try very hard to
> do their job with just those few actions. Now I sometimes wonder why
> selecting an item doesn't just pop-up up a window with all possible
> actions on the item instead of having to know which keys to press. This
> doesn't mean I don't think shortcut keys for people using wireless
> keyboards or extensive remote controls aren't usefull, they are very
> usefull, but I do think that sometimes things are a bit too difficult
> for people using simpler remotes.

It's worthwhile having a look at how VDR does this, for some ideas.

What happens there is that the first time you run it up, it asks you to wiggle your remote, or press keys to choose your controls.  However, the key thing is that you can stop after you have choosen like "up", "down" and "menu".  The point is that you every EXTRA key that you choose to map then becomes a useful shortcut to an action that can also be reached by popping up the menu and navigating.

The menu structures themselves are usually designed to be used by remotes with either numbers or red, green, blue, yellow keys (certainly common on European remotes at least), so you have something like the most common options ready to choose with the colours, or if it's a bigger list then you get a menu onscreen and can either scroll up and down, or I think you can also press a number directly.

So the key features are:

a) that there are multiple ways to get to each action, eg popup menu or press accelerator key
b) you can choose to map as many or few keys as you like (depends how many keys you have spare on your remote)
c) the list of re-mapable keys seems to be global, so all add-ins try to fit into the existing key mapping and behave in a consistent way

Just some ideas anyway

Ed W