[mythtv-users] Console Display and UI other than OSD?

[Carl Alexander]

On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 10:01, James L. Paul wrote:
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> On Wednesday 18 February 2004 7:03 am, Carl Alexander wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > New to MythTV and I'm still in the research phase of my project, but on
> > the topic a useful display for the appliance other than the OSD on my
> > TV, what do people do?  It seems stupid to turn on the TV to listen to
> > music, and when navigating a 40Gb + music archive using a serial port
> > based LCD seems both limited and a lot of work re-engineering the UI.
> > Has anyone tried small LCDs such as those used in embedded devices, like
> > these?:
> 
> I had similar thoughts, but eventually came to the conclusion that the TV was 
> the ideal display for controlling non-TV features. The complexity and 
> redundancy to add another display or interfaced now seems stupid to me in 
> comparison with simply turning the TV display on. :) If I'm listening to 
> music, I can simply turn it back once I have started my playlist.
> 


>From an assembly and engineering perspective, sure, it's harder and more
expensive.  But that's not what I care about.  I care more about the
usability of the end product.  If I hook up my HTPC to my nice
projector, I really don't want to turn down the lights and turn on my
projector to play music and read a book. You really really don't want to
do this if you are a track flipper like me; I rarely listen to the same
playlist twice.

The thought behind a small LCD that has NTSC or VGA input is that
splitting a UI onto that would be less work than a ground-up
reengineering of a UI to fit a 2 or 4 line LED/LCD/Vacuum display, add
support for display interfaces, and design a new control key flow that
makes sence with the new display & UI.  It should only require an
appropriate theme and the ability to say "video on display 1, control &
UI on display 1 and display 0". If the UI theming, timeout/blanking, etc
could be individually controlled on each display, it would be even
sexier since I wouldn't expect the same theme to be ideal for a 4"
display as for a wall sized display.

A 4x6" 1200x234 pixel LCD - such as is availible on the site I reference
- is easilly shorter than height of my reciever and could be mounted in
the front of my HTPC case. I agree that another external monitor - even
a small one - is a clumsy solution.


> > http://www.lcdtft.com/search_result.asp?MANUFACTURER=LCD%20Modules&CATEGORY
> >=LCD%20Monitors It seems like all it would take for something like this to
> > give you an instant console display would be a 2nd video card and the
> > ability to configure MythTV to have UI on one display and playback on
> > another. (In practice you would probably want UI on both, just no or
> > limited or configurable playback on the console - maybe for music eye
> > candy)
> 
> My approach originally was to simply use the twinview feature of my nVidia 
> card to clone the display on a small monitor. After a short time it was 
> simply redundant and I found it much easier to just use the nice big TV. The 
> WAF was also higher with a single display than with 2. ;)
> 

I thoguht about that, but that seems like the poor mans solutions. A
console display and OSD are really different beasts.  I don't want DVD
playback on the console, I don't want continous track and time info on
the OSD if watching a DVD.

> > Thoughts?
> >
> > And on a unrelated issue, anyone recommend a good source for chipped
> > DVD-ROMs or firmware patches? region codes are so very annoying for my
> > import DVD collection...
> 
> I don't know much about that, I've never needed to do it myself. I would 
> expect a good source of info to be dvdrhelp.com, but I haven't looked.
> 

THanks. I'll check it out.

   --- Carl