[mythtv-users] Programming remote button bindings (WAS: What major features are planned for 0.27?)

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/29/2012 07:32 AM, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> I was actually trying to help, since usability is my area of preofessional expertise. But I'm getting a real impression that the myth team aren't interested in making the user interface better, they only want more features and more stuff to fiddle with. So I give up, I'll go and try to help out with xbmc instead.

No, MythTV developers are working extremely hard to try to make things 
easier for user and to make the user interface better.  However, we have 
a plan for how it will be done--such that it doesn't just make things 
easier for you (or other people who have a remote like yours) and at the 
same time make things harder for other users (with remotes with very 
different layouts).

What I'm trying to avoid, now, is cluttering up our default key 
bindings.  Adding a new default key binding is a very painful 
process--it means that we have to check to see if the user has already 
mapped that key to some other action in a context that will conflict 
with the one to which we're attempting to add the new bindings (or just 
punt and let the users fix all key bindings conflicts that arise--and 
suffer the problems caused by the conflicts as well as trying to figure 
out that it's a key bindings conflict that's causing the strange 
behavior they're observing).  Also, for users who later decide that the 
default key bindings aren't correct (i.e. the user wants KEY_PLAY mapped 
to TV Playback|PLAY, even though we had decided our default should be to 
map it to TV Playback|PAUSE--and, yes, this is likely what you would 
argue should be the default, which, BTW, would mean that users with both 
play and pause buttons would have 2 buttons with identical 
functionality, which, IMHO, is a waste of a perfectly good button), they 
must go into the key editor and /first/ remove the current binding for 
KEY_PLAY (from all contexts which would conflict) and then add the new 
binding.  This makes mapping those keys much more difficult than just 
"starting fresh."

Key bindings themes will allow us to make it easy for the user (just 
download a theme, then use it or edit it as desired) while also 
preventing the problems above.  It will also allow users to apply the 
same theme on multiple frontends--and even to create new themes by 
exporting their "finely-tuned over years of MythTV usage with my given 
remote" key bindings and then share their themes with others.

Mike