[mythtv-users] Controlling how far into a recording the preview thumbnail snapshot is taken

[Michael T. Dean]

  On 10/06/2010 12:31 PM, George Poulson wrote:
> On 6 October 2010 17:09, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> The only way to control the preview pixmap offset in trunk is to set a
>> bookmark.
> Mike - Many thanks for this very comprehensive reply.
>
> That's because the section where the preview is taken is /not/ marked as an
>> advertisement--the commercial detection failed for you in that section.
>>   Watch the show and you'll see that the commercial that was used for the
>> preview is actually in a section that's not marked as a commercial.
>>
> You are quite right- in all cases when I have preview snapshots of
> commercials it /is/ the commercial detection that has failed. In all other
> cases the previews are fine.
>
> The current approach in trunk is significantly better than the
>> single-offset-for-all-recordings approach we previously had.  I did a very
>> extensive test with>1300 recordings I have recorded over a period of years
>> by backporting the smart preview pixmap offset to 0.23-fixes and running it
>> on my production machine.  It was /significantly/ better than using /any/
>> single offset for all recordings.  However, (as before) it can fail when
>> commercial flagging fails.
>>
> Agreed; as a relative newcomer here I don't have anything like this number
> of recordings, nor the experience of Myth that you have, but I can now see
> that this is clearly a far better method of generating previews, and where
> my previews have 'failed' it is a failure of the commercial detection that
> has caused the problem.

And I hope to have new code that makes it better with the multiple 
bookmark support in the very near future.

Oh, and I should probably apologize if it seemed I was yelling at 
anyone.  More than anything I get a bit overly touchy when it seems like 
(even if I'm misinterpreting comments) someone is asking to resurrect 
some setting that was removed for what I feel is a good reason.

Anyway, I hope that the explanation gives you all a better idea of where 
we are and where we hope to go with future releases.

Oh, and thanks for mentioning the wiki page.  I've removed the setting 
from that section since it's removed from what will (soon) become the 
official release.

Mike