Difference between revisions of "Feature Wishlist (Frontend Addons)"

Revision as of 19:12, 2 May 2006

This articles represents a subsection of the Feature Wishlist.

Frontend Addons

General

• Add support for DVB radio - done? - in svn after 0.19
• make screenshot
• Key to switch between windowed and full screen mode
• MythTheme plugin for downloading Themes and install it from an directory of all themes
• On screen help. Press F1 and it tells you what keys do what at that point in time. Also tells you more about each function.

How does this work with Remotes?

Try pressing "1" on your remote

I'm planning on tackling this as my first bit of mythdev :) --DavidGreaves

• Screensaver for widescreen plasma/rear-projection TVs, to avoid burn-in when displaying 4:3 content --Anaerin

XScreensaver support is in Myth, all you need do is install it in your box

• Implement a frontend gui that is based on xosd for text display and display on top of xscreensaver modules running on root window - this would allow for cool 3d backgrounds in the mythtv frontend

there is a new GUI based on OpenGL in CVS ...

• Add default ifconfig output to the System Status area of the Information Center
• Add ability to change the OSD theme from mythfrontend (using the same appearance setup area as current theme picker)
• Sound feedback for received remote control commands. This would notify the user of a valid/invalid key press by the sound emitted.

See response under 'action sound' in the page above

• support for the Amino AmiNET124 IPTV set-top box. If you throw an MPEG transport stream on a multicast address/UDP port, the AmiNET124 renders it to a TV (supports at least MPEG2, H.264 and AAC, probably MPEG audio layer 2 and AC3 as well). The AmiNET124 also claims to have a JVM inside, so theoretically it could run a limited mythfrontend to display menus and handle pause/skip/rewind. http://www.aminocom.com/products/ipstb/aminet124.html
• internal player could show information about the stream in the Info OSD - picture dimensions and bitrate and also sound frequency and bitrate. Something like "544x576 2.6 Mbps, 48 kHz 192 kbps". Would be helpful since some DVB-S/T are really trying to save the bandwidth and one wonders why the picture is so noisy/blocking and sound so poor.

Menu Mode

• A clock in the menu system (Maybe available with 0.20 when the new UI is used which allow animations...)
• a clock in the corner of the menus (maybe I just have the wrong theme)
• X10 Home Automation, or you could read this as a request to add a basic menu editing GUI, to add program start buttons for example
• Draw a line to seperate days in recording menus
• Some new hotkeys in recording menus
• add "smooth scroll" option to OSD Program Guide for horizontal and vertical scroll
• Include the free DejaVu fonts in MythTV (same as previously suggested Vera fonts but with a wider range of characters)
• Display channel number/name under preview window when in menu mode. Currently, the live channel being displayed and the highlighted square in the menu have no relation to each other, so you have to pretty much guess what channel you're seeing. (This is more important with the option to go to menu mode when entering LiveTV set.)
• breadcrumbs on menu display so end users don't get lost in menu system eg Main Menu->Manage recordings...
• Add BACK and MAIN MENU buttons for touchscreen access.
• allow some capability to go directly to some menus via Remote control eg Watch Live TV or Guide etc..

I think this exists with jump points, see Edit Keys menu option under Utilities/Setup

• a summary of HDD free (approx hh:mm or size/GB or %free) on main menu or top of every menu.
• Sounds in the menus when you move around or select somthing. (pings and pongs)
• Adjust Volume in the menus
• Make more menu items viewable on the screen at one time instead of having to scroll up or down to see all the options.
• View count, especially useful if stored per user, to see if everyone has already seen the recording - would be nice to have an addition to options menu for "mark as seen by:" with submenu for defined viewers. This would really help in determining when shows can be deleted. Also see this suggestion for some further refinements. If programs are flagged with who wants to see them, if you tell myth who is in the room, myth can present a list of programs those people want to see, ordered by the number of people present who want to see it.
• a 'digest' button that will bring up a scene index, possibly automated by grabbing a frame every X minutes, or by a framedump tool similar to the commercial cutter.
• Show what recording profile were used to record a show, record profiles can change over time, so maybe this should fall back to displaying just the settings used.

This exists to some extent you can see what profile was used but not what the settings are. Select "edit recording schedule" from the menu in the view recordings screen

LiveTV / View Recording

• provide opengl output to make it work with xgl (it is possible with NO_XV=1 but it is slow)
• Videotext/Teletext with analog TV-Cards
• Make OSD Scrollable, so that longer Descriptions are also visible (Maybe autoscroll or with a key)
• options to adjust video hue, contrast, color, brightness via OSD example screen from ChrisTV
• Automatically turn on CC / subtitles when LiveTV is muted, sometimes called QuickCaps apparently.
• LiveTV should also have a 'recording' priority, so you can queue shows that won't record when you are watching something else on LiveTV
• implement opengl photo transition effects as effects to be selected for channel change in LiveTV
• alarm clock feature - start playing liveTV from a given channel for a set period of time on given days of the week (i.e. weekdays, weekends)
• LiveTV multichannel preview mode - show a snapshot of each channel on a 3x3 or 4x4 matrix. Allow arrow keys and ff/rw to scroll through channels and enter to select channel
• change behavior going to LiveTV or attempting to change channels when all tuners are in use to provide a menu allowing the user to cancel a currently-running recording job and delete the recording.
• Provide a setting for maximum time on LiveTV or "Watch Recordings" screen with active mini preview video without any user event (i.e. no remote signal, no keypress, no channel change). When time reached, kick MythTV back out to main screen. This will prevent unnecessary ringbuffer disk I/O after set time. A reasonable default time for this may be 6 hours.
• Automatic fine tuning, using signal strength it will scan a few kHz in each direction until it locks on the strongest signal then updates the database for that channel.
• Fine tuning with preview or while watching LiveTV, many channels are out of tune on my system and a small adjustment or two make a huge difference.
• Implement an automatic volume leveling algorithm that is common in many TVs, such as Magnavox's "Smart Sound." This attempts to eliminate drastic volume spikes that commonly occur in commercials.
• Implement a way to stream shows over the internet or other low-bandwidth connections - similar to the Slingbox. This would allow the ability to watch on a Linux laptop if you're at work. Or, even the possiblity of a truly remote mythfrontend - like one hooked up at a friend's apartment, which uses the storage and tuner of a backend elsewhere.
• Ability to take a snapshot of the current frame, maybe to press R whilst paused to take a snapshot of the current frame.
• Enable browsing channels across tuners.

has this been done in 0.19?

• Display the recording and/or original air date in the OSD when viewing a recording.
• Make editing out of commercials easier. In addition to buttons for forward, backward, shorter jump, longer jump, etc., have a button for "this frame is part of the program" and one for "this frame is a commercial." The editor would automatically do a kind of binary search, using the key presses to decide whether to move foreward or backward, and where to place the cut points. The basic algorithm: the editor shows the first frame of the recording. If the user says it's commercial, place a start cut point and keep moving forward by the (configurable) minimum commercial break length until the user says it's not a commercial. At that point, move backward by half the minimum commercial break length. If that frame is also a commercial, move forward by a quarter of the break length; otherwise move that distance backward, and so on. When the distance to move gets to a single frame, mark the end point of the cut and move forward by the (configurable) minimum time between commercials plus the minimum commercial break length. As long as the user indicates it is a program frame, keep moving forward by the minimum break length, until a commercial frame is found, and then use a similar binary search to find the start of the commercial. Repeat util finished. Comm flagging could be used as a hint for where to start looking for the cut points.
• Type number and jump to channel in EPG, when you have hundreds of channels.

Already in 0.19, check options under Utilities/Setup and TV.

• Jump to quote from closed captioning, so you can for example have a search for 'weather' and jump to the weather forecast in today's news broadcast.
• For users of HDTV's, would it be possible to tile multiple standard definition tv recordings together into one tiled display? To create a poorman's videowall, where, if you had an HDTV and multiple standard def tuner cards, you could watch two or three TV shows at once. I guess this would be a feature enhancement to the picture in picture support that MythTV already has. However I've not yet seen this capability to comment on how close it can be made to a true multi signal "videowall".
• Display usage statistics : total hours recorded / total hours viewed by months and weeks. Optionally display warnings when daily/weekly usage becomes higher than a defined amount.
• Allow filtering of profanity - An audio filter that would blank out profanity when it is detected. For the detection, use a combination of closed captioning, audio levels (to detect what word the audio stream is on), and/or voice recognition (hardest, CPU intensive). Many of the configuration settings would be similar to commercial detection, except just the audio stream. Make movies kid and in-law safe.
• Allow access to the Program Guide from within recordings. This would be helpful in scheduling recordings of new programs that I often see commercials for when watching a recording, but quickly forget about. This would eliminate having to exit the recording and going to drilling through the menus to the program guide, and then back again. This used to be possible with the Old Live TV.

This is already available in LiveTV. To enable similar when watching recordings, you can define a Jump Point for the EPG. Pressing the mapped key will then save a bookmark in your recording and goto the EPG. To get back, you'd have to navigate appropriately to the Recordings screen and then continue watching your recording.

• Enable browse mode via mouse (ala ATI Media Center). I miss being able to press the mouse button on the remote up and it shows whats on the other channels without changing them. You then press enter to change to that channel.

This is already available in 0.19. Check the options under TV Playback. I think it's called Enable Browse Mode.