[mythtv-users] 0.22 MythVideo slow first time cover art displays

[Kevin Kuphal]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Kevin Kuphal <kkuphal at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's a shame that this happens at all.  I've been setting up a Vista
>> Media Center machine to place in front of my exercise equipment so
>> that I can get Hulu, Netflix, DVD, etc all in one box.  It has a
>> plugin called Media Browser that basically does a cover flow style
>> view of recordings/videos using fanart from the same places Myth gets
>> it from.
>>
>> This software handles all the cover art download in the background and
>> it just fades in as it is made available.  So much nicer of an
>> experience than what you are describing and I'm disappointed that a
>> background thread handling of coverart isn't being included.
>
> I'm disappointed that Myth doesn't make me coffee and bacon in the
> morning, but nobody has written the code for that, either.
>
> I (and others) would surely welcome such a patch, but given the
> numerous hours I know one particular dev who knows MythUI backwards
> and forward has spent on this particular issue, I know for a fact that
> it's not as simple as that...
>
> Nobody is "not including" their patches, this stuff is *hard*.

Of course it is and nothing about what I said diminishes the effort or
appreciation for it.  Why does any criticism of the "status quo"
result in a return response insinuating a lack of appreciation for the
work already put in?  Isn't it valid in a software development project
to bring up points related to release cycle timing and included
features?  I've commited a handful of things here and there to MythTV
and I know it's hard.  The UI pieces are far beyond my ability for
sure.

It is obvious that the fanart/coverart feature is one that is highly
valued by the community given the discussions I see here.  I know I'm
very anxious to have it on my system.  My point here is that in this
instance, and with others such as metadata download for Watch
Recordings (also included in Graphite which is in SVN and distributed
with Myth now), that it has a "half-baked" feeling about it.  Not that
it lacks quality, but that it more unfinished than I would expect for
a release.  I personally would have rather seen fanart left out of
0.22 and included in 0.23 with all these usability questions ironed
out.  Waiting 2-3s for browsing media may not seem like a big deal
given that it's a one time thing.  But it just brings up the idea that
it *could* happen in the background and not impact the UI.  If this is
on the roadmap, great.  It's happened before with the scheduler
"hanging" the frontend while we wait for it to finish and the frontend
was improved so that this isn't much of an issue anymore.  Driving
things with background events seems a given for today's software to
me, especially one that, generally speaking, is very quick in most
operations as it stands currently.  I guess in the end my point was
simply expressing a concern over timing of a release including this
feature if such improvements are coming in the next release since it
is a brand new feature for 0.22.

I'm a huge fan of MythTV and certainly don't like any part of it being
unduly criticized, especially if the criticism could have been avoided
through a different timing of when features were
added/committed/released.