[mythtv-users] What is being worked on for 0.26?

[Steven Adeff]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Preston Crow
<pc-mythtv08a at crowcastle.net> wrote:
> Lots of good discussion here, but I don't think we're going far enough.  Why
> shouldn't we merge videos, recordings, photos, and games into a generic
> "media" storage?  I'm serious here--hear me out.  (Besides, what is Mythgame
> but a clone of Mythvideo using external media players that happen to be game
> emulators instead of video players?)
>
> There are two things to consider, and they can be independent:  How do we
> track things in the database, and how do we display them in the user
> interface.  In general, if we segregate things in the backend database, it
> is difficult to merge them in the user interface, but going the other way is
> easy.
>
> So what we need to track media is a combination of tags and metadata. I'll
> define a tag as a value that is either present or absent for a media file,
> like "game" or "auto-expire."  A metadatum is much like a tag, but it is a
> key-value pair, such as "Title: Babylon 5" or "Cutlist: <internal
> reference>."  (Of course, my tags could just be metadata with a blank value
> for the key, which might further simplify the implementation.)
>
> If we converted all our current media stores to use tags and metadata in a
> manner like I described, we could then easily merge things in interesting
> ways, probably including many that developers never considered.  For
> example, a good music playlist system could be used for slideshows of
> photos.
>
> The user interface could stay the same with this change, and new options
> could be provided that combine and segregate various media types in
> different ways.  The goal for the backend design should be to provide
> maximum flexibility for the frontend.

my only comment to that is, build the framework for this first by
merging the obvious (recordings and mythvideo), building in the
ability to add anything else, then merge the rest in.

otherwise, I agree, it's possible, and would not be a huge paradigm
shift once the initial merge is accomplished.

my one fear though, mostly because of the debacle that is the new
MythMusic, is that without the right people handling it, it could turn
into a cluster<expletive>.

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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