[mythtv-users] WISH: "Surf Mode" like ATI Media Center

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:59:38 -0600
    From: Kevin Kuphal <kuphal at dls.net>

    To me it sounds like a holdover from pre-program guide days.  Why watch 
    100 images that change every few seconds when you can just look at the 
    program guide to see what is on (with descriptions)?

I think the original poster also liked the eye candy aspect of it;
a poor man's "cable company control room wall of monitors", perhaps.

Myself, I'm considering whipping up something like this as a
diagnostic aid, though without the "refresh all the time" and
"interactivity" parts.  My sources often move channels around without
keeping Zap2It properly in the loop, transmit black video, flake out
and transmit screensaver-like things from the headend saying "No
Video", occasionally reset the cable box so it -claims- it's on one
channel but is in reality on some completely random channel, and a
variety of other misbehavior.  It'd be convenient to have a little
display that gets updated every so often with a matrix of all the
channels on it; that way, I can spot something going bad long in
advance, rather than ex post facto, after I've already got a bad
recording.  In particular, knowing in advance might allow me to
schedule extra recordings on channels that repeat a lot, whereas a bad
recording is often not spotted until the next day or so (since I don't
monitor everything in real time---it's a PVR, after all) which is
usually too late to catch a same-evening repeat (often the only
repeat available).

This might also be handy when travelling, as a sanity check that the
various inputs are still getting something reasonable, again in time
to have someone fix something, since it's pretty easy to just ssh in
and look at the image matrix, or even have it sent somewhere, as
opposed to trying to (essentially) flip through live video through
what's probably a high-latency, low-bandwidth pipe.

[This stuff is sort of the dual of some automation ideas I mentioned
here months ago, e.g., detectors that notice "too few pixels have
changed in the last n seconds/minutes---frozen or black video is being
transmitted" [my local PBS affiliates are notorious for this in the
wee hours], or "the recording is way too short 'cause the tuner lost
lock", etc etc, with the goal of having Myth auto-reschedule if it
detects that something went bad.]

P.S.  Next bit of eye candy---build two matrices, do a pixel-by-pixel
XOR, and display the results.  Frozen video would pop out as solid
black; CNN-like channels might look interesting because of the crawl
and/or talking-heads pseudo-static effect; typical channels would look
pretty random but it might be a somewhat artsy effect.  Maybe it could
be used as one of MythMusic's visualizations...