[mythtv-users] ease of setup

[Osma Ahvenlampi]

On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 18:40 +0100, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> A couple of the things I want to do for 0.21 will make setup a little easier 
> for some. (xmltv mainly, possibly lirc) The SoC settings work should also 
> help.

I'm wondering, what do you have in mind regarding the lirc setup? This
was by far the most time-intensive part about my setup year and a half
ago when I started up - the trickiest was getting DVB up and running
(MUCH easier now), but the one that took the longest to get to a
satisfactory condition was going through the chain of finding a usable
"device" to emulate for my Kameleon remote, teaching that to lirc, and
then mapping that to MythTV key commands.

Again, some of that should be far easier now when MythTV supports
assigning commands to remote keys, bypassing the keyboard assignments
(at least that's how I've understood the mechanism to work, but I have
to admit that since I got mine working, I haven't bothered to check
what's new in that department).

I figure it shouldn't be all that difficult to create a GUI on top of
the entire chain, and combine the steps of "teach lirc" and "assign Myth
functions to remote keys" together. It does require getting a pretty
good overview of what keys are conveniently available in various
remotes, what's the optimum mapping to MythTV functions, and perhaps
changing a couple of places (for example, I haven't ever figured out a
usable mapping of the recording editor keybindings to the remote keys -
that remains the only frequently used function I have to pull the
keyboard out for).

Ideally, you could just have a selection of a few very common remote
types preconfigured, or a wizard which asks the user to press each
remote key in a sequence that automatically assigns them to the
best-match function in MythTV.

> Setup is also complicated by users - for every feature that is added to MythTV 
> there will be a number of people who want the ability to turn it on/off, 
> inevitably this means more settings screens and the potential for things to 
> be set up in a broken manner.

I think the setup menus are overflowing with stuff that really shouldn't
be a configuration item at all - the system should be able to pick the
optimum automatically, or the configuration items simply hidden
completely. Also, there's a few places where things just don't make any
sense - such as sound being configured in a completely difference
section from video, when both really are playback options.

I've been very curious as to what's up with "Settings rework" Summer of
Code project, but haven't found any news about that anywhere...

Anyway - I'd be happy to help in this kind of project, but I'm afraid I
won't have the time to dust off my C++, let alone learn the MythTV
architecture in order to contribute code past minor patches. If there's
something that can be done on a UI level, or someone who'd like to have
help reorganise config items, that's a different matter, tho.

//osma