[mythtv-users] Thumbnail update after commercial job finishes

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Oct 28 21:00:58 UTC 2008


On 10/28/2008 04:39 PM, Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> On Oct 28, 2008, at 1:33 PM, David Fishburn wrote:
>> MythTV 0.21
>>
>> Most of the time the png (thumbnail) stored for my recorded shows have
>> nothing to do with the show itself.  I use the static thumbnails as
>> opposed to playing the show in preview mode.
>>
>> Most of the time the thumbnails are of commercials and credits and
>> have nothing to do with the show.
>>
>> All my shows are run through the commercial flagger.
>>
>> I was wondering if it was possible to update the thumbnail when the
>> flagger finished and pick part of the show based on the flagged
>> commercials.  That would give it a much higher chance of having a
>> relevant thumbnail.
>>
>> Has anyone done this?
> You can choose the number of seconds after the start of the recording  
> where the frame is grabbed for the thumbnail.

Which, BTW, is a completely useless setting because a) there's no one 
number of seconds in that will always appear in the show rather than in 
the commercials and b) Myth automatically regenerates the preview any 
time anything about the recording changes--including the completion of 
commercial flagging--and takes the flag list into account when 
generating the preview.

In other words, Myth already does exactly what you're asking for, Dave, 
and has since 0.18(ish?).  If your previews aren't being updated, 
something else is going on to prevent the update.

And--because I'm sure a bunch of the same people who helped to ensure 
the GSoC settings-simplification project was doomed to failure by saying 
it's a must-have setting are bound to tell me why I'm wrong--for those 
who don't use commercial flagging, the value that a user picks for the 
preview offset is no more likely to be good than any default value that 
Myth were to provide.  And, since Myth takes into account the amount of 
time the recording starts before the scheduled program start (whether 
the recording-rule-specified start early or the spin-up used for getting 
the capture card/hard drive going), you can't say it needs to be 
different because some use different start early times.

And, for those who want a specific image, they can simply set a bookmark 
and tell Myth to attempt to generate previews at bookmarks.

Mike (who believes that placebo--I mean setting--should be cast into a 
fiery pit for all eternity)


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