[mythtv-users] 0.22 annoyances

[David Engel]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 03:15:27PM +0000, Ben Woodhouse wrote:
> List box behavior seems to be completely broken now. List boxes
> inexplicably change focus when you reach the end, so if I'm
> scrolling to the end of a list of articles in mythnews, the focus
> will switch back to the news sources list instead of just stopping
> at the end. Now I have to carefully scroll down, making sure I don't
> go past the last entry, otherwise I'll have to scroll down all over
> again. I don't understand the reasoning for this change. If I'd
> wanted to switch to the left hand list box, I could simply press
> left.
> 
> Probably related to this, if I scroll all the way to the right in
> the browser, the UI will switch focus to some pointless control
> above the browser window. There must be a better way to do this.

This behavior is all now controlled by the theme instead of by the
widget code.  Personally, I dislike the "scrolling past the end moves
focus to the next widget" behaviour too and would like to see the
default themes changed back to more pre-0.22 like behavior.

> As others have noted (here for example :
> http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2009-November/270659.html),
> the right button on the recordings menu no longer works. The menu is
> now inaccessable on my remote. I could reconfigure it, but I don't
> want to use a less accessible button to access one of the most
> commonly used menus, just because I might be using a theme which
> supports horizontal scrolling (I'm not and I don't intend to).

As has been noted multiple times, the right button menu was a casualty
of allowing the theme to control widget traversal.  The menu can still
be accessed by pressing the button tied to the INFO action.  The
option is open for someone to add support so a theme can specify that
an action (such as bringing up a menu) should occur instead of widget
traversal.

> There's no delete recordings view, which would be fine, except
> there's no way to see how much space there is left, or change the
> sort order (unless that's now in the hidden menu I can no longer
> access)

There is no loss in functionality between the watch recordings and
delete recordings screens except for the disk space usage display.
Someone does need to add the space usage back in.  A separate delete
recordings screen is probably never coming back though.

> Memory use is astronomical on all the themes I've tried (mythbuntu,
> blue abstract, mythcentre wide, graphite), and mythfrontend seems to
> leak memory like a sieve, even when it's just idling. I've seen it
> peak at around 3GB at times. Restarting the frontend fixes it
> temorarily, but it always becomes unusable again after a day or
> so. My 1GB system just isn't sufficient any more, as a workaround
> I'm planning to upgrade to 4GB, but I really shouldn't need to do
> that for an lightweight SD-only media box.

I haven't noticed excessive memory usage with MythCenter[wide].  I'm
not saying it can't happen, just that I haven't noticed it.

> When skipping forwards/back through a recording, it pauses for a
> long time between skips when the button is held down, so skipping
> forward through a show takes a very long time. This is probably
> caused by the fact that it's playing the video between iterations,
> which didn't happen in 0.21

I haven't seen this.  Are your sure your seektable isn't corrupted?

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:42:25AM -0500, Devin Heitmueller wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Ben Woodhouse <ben32768 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > In my house at least, 0.22 has been a big step backwards in terms
> > of usability. So for the time being, I'm switching back to 0.21
> > and holding out to see if any of these issues are fixed in the
> > next release. I guess in the meantime I should submit some bug
> > reports.
> 
> Rather than submitting bug reports, how about rolling up your sleeves
> and submitting some *patches* instead?

I would welcome patches to the default themes to "fix" the focus
change problems.  We would need concurrence from other developers to
put them in svn, but I would seriously consider using them myself.

David
-- 
David Engel
david at istwok.net