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

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 16:13 -0500, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> I understand it works very well once the images are downloaded.  My
> comment was along the lines of why the download wasn't backgrounded in
> the first place given the dependence on outside sources that could be
> down, unavailable, or slow for a user.  Why not design a UI that
> handles such problematic pieces to occur behind the scenes?  Seems a
> much better experience for users to find that fanart (or any other
> metadata that we might support in the future) appears as they are
> working with the software (or after a specific fetch) rather than a
> halting UI that you wait for while it does the work.  It's the same
> complaint people put forward for Watch Recordings for scheduler
> updates, preview generation, etc. etc. and work was done to make those
> background tasks.  Seems that it would be logical that new features
> would build on that work rather than be subject to similar
> criticisms...

Kevin, I actually have a task ticket to speed up some things
in Watch Recordings that got slowed down by the MythUI porting.
I don't think it makes sense for Stuart M. to spend his time
on this. He has an expertise in the new UI library and it we'll
complete the port more quickly if he does the porting and you
and I do the follow on work, like making it snappy.

Your original criticism is valid, of course we should background
meta-data downloads. I even wrote a HttpPool class to handle this
type of thing when I ported MythNews to Qt4. It shouldn't be a
very difficult task to plug that in for the next release.

-- Daniel