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

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* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: Playback of recordings could start at the time the recording was scheduled to start and any extra time that one schedules (to ensure that the beginning isn't missed) could be available in the buffer if, and only if, the user was forced to rewind to see the beginning. This would presumably require something to be inserted in the recording by the backend.
 
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: Playback of recordings could start at the time the recording was scheduled to start and any extra time that one schedules (to ensure that the beginning isn't missed) could be available in the buffer if, and only if, the user was forced to rewind to see the beginning. This would presumably require something to be inserted in the recording by the backend.
 
::Are you proposing some form of scheduled start of a LiveTV session? MythTV is designed such that you don't watch when the show is on the air, but at some point later at your leisure. Additionally, the LiveTV buffer was removed several years ago with LiveTV now behaving as a recording, storing the entire session straight to disk.
 
::Are you proposing some form of scheduled start of a LiveTV session? MythTV is designed such that you don't watch when the show is on the air, but at some point later at your leisure. Additionally, the LiveTV buffer was removed several years ago with LiveTV now behaving as a recording, storing the entire session straight to disk.
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: Put the name of the day in the top-left corner of the EPG -- often the day is more important than the day.
+
:::No, Hooloovoo is asking for regular recordings to begin playback where the scheduled start time would have begun. So if the user has set the recording to start 2 minutes before the scheduled start time, then playback would jump to 2 minutes after the start of the recording. As most programs will rarely start early the user wont have to fast forward to the start of the program as much, but they can still rewind when the program does start early.
 +
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: Put the name of the day in the top-left corner of the EPG -- often the day is more important than the date.
 
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: The "Delete Recordings" screen should show how much space would be left if all deleted-but-not-expired shows were expired. The reason that I go into the screen is to decide whether I need to delete files to make more space and in those circumstances deleted-but-not-expired is equivalent to gone.
 
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: The "Delete Recordings" screen should show how much space would be left if all deleted-but-not-expired shows were expired. The reason that I go into the screen is to decide whether I need to delete files to make more space and in those circumstances deleted-but-not-expired is equivalent to gone.
 
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: A new recording option for weekly recording at approximately that time. The problem with time-based recording settings are that they don't deal with schedule changes like a two-hour finale. The problem with title-based options is that they catch other (rerun) series that aren't related. Normally, for me, a series would include any shows on that day of the week that start within two hours of the start time and end within two hours of the end time.
 
* [[User:Hooloovoo|Hooloovoo]]: A new recording option for weekly recording at approximately that time. The problem with time-based recording settings are that they don't deal with schedule changes like a two-hour finale. The problem with title-based options is that they catch other (rerun) series that aren't related. Normally, for me, a series would include any shows on that day of the week that start within two hours of the start time and end within two hours of the end time.

Revision as of 01:17, 29 January 2010

This articles represents a subsection of the Feature Wishlist.

General

  • Ability to set x/y offset and scaling in a Playback Group -- currently, you can change the MythTV playback settings globally to adjust the x/y offsets and scale. This is great, particularly for sports that you record, because then you can scale and adjust the screen when you playback so you don't see scores of other games going on. Imagine a scenario where you are recording two games at once...you want to watch one, but not see the scores along the bottom (or top, or side) of the screen to ruin it for you. You can do this by changing the scale and offset globally, but it would be GREAT if you could do this on the fly in a Playback Group instead of having to go and manually set the preferences before you watch it, and then change it back after you watch the show before you watch something else, in the settings. This would have other applications besides just sports, imagine you didn't want to see ads show up at the bottom of your shows (advertisers and networks are starting to do this), or if you didn't want to see election results on election night, or any number of other reasons. Thank you for your consideration.
  • Idea :: recordings shuffle mode -- for our kids, we've many recordings of children shows and want to be able to control what they can watch on remote frontend. Works well with playback groups. Would be good, though, if the remote frontend had some sort of Shuffle mode on the kiddie recordings so we can start it and they can watch various shows as if TV, but we know that they are only watching appropriate material. Or maybe, the same functionality could be implemented as a backend streaming option, in effect, creating our own TV channel for the children (see suggestion "Idea :: recordings shuffle mode" in Backend Wishlist)
    • Voting for this feature request. --Rootwerk 12:35, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Ability to choose a frontend that has low memory requirements. (basic themes and rendering system) For systems with fast CPUs but limited system memory.
    • Themes and rendering engines are already user selectable. What more do you want? wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • DAAP client capabilities would allow for streaming of iTunes music libraries; current solutions require moving or duplicating the iTunes library on the MythTV device. There are several open-source DAAP implementations that could be leveraged, including Rhythmbox and Banshee, or Java ones such as iLeech or ourTunes. This would be a fantastic addition to MythTV considering the number of iTunes users out there in the world. Thank you for this consideration.
  • Add currently playing mythmusic info to the network socket control queries. This could be used for a rich remote control on wi-fi with something like the Nokia Internet tablets. Interface could then show current song, position, album art, and control mythmusic remotely.
  • Mythfrontend reconnect interval. If the backend becomes unavailable the frontend should try to reconnect after XX interval. Selecting OK on the ui does not cause the frontend to reconnect.
  • Time out previews in recording list - this would allow unattended / TV off frontends to spin down the HD in the middle of the night. If the preview keeps spinning, the HD keeps spinning. - As a workaround I've written a little perl script that jumps back to Main Menu from the recordings list when DPMS kicks in --Freman 00:57, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
  • ""Add a button for mythfilldatabase" It would be nice to have a button somewhere in the frontend (probebly next to system info) to do an mythfilldatabase to get the latest xmltv without having to leave the frontend. Ideally, this should be implemented by having the frontend ask the backend to run mythfilldatabase immediately, so that it is run in nearly the same way as the timed run; this way it's useful for debugging too.
  • Season Handling in Watch Recordings. If you have Season and Episode information in your EPG it would be nice to have a possibility to categorise on that information. e.g. on the Watch recordings you get "Series Title" for the Series, and you then get on the right hand side Season 1, Season 2, ... where you can drive into to see the Episodes, Sorted by Episode number.
  • Multiple language support for Guide Data. In most locales, programming in multiple languages is received (English + Spanish in the USA, English + French in Canada, many other languages in Europe). Thus, it would be really handy if the 'programs' table had a language key, indicating the language of the title/subtitle/description, and potentially another indicating the language (or languages) of the audio. This could then allow searches based on language, and smarter handling of programs in different languages. Is this information readily available or easily inferred from most guide sources? I know DVB guides include it in the stream. How about DataDirect? Other sources? I'm more than willing to work on this, but would like a reality check and some comments from people more experienced with Myth than I am. Chhamilton 9:14 AST, 16 January 2006.
  • Configurable prefix handling in Program Finder. Related to the above, I would like smarter prefix handling in the Program Finder. Ideally, this would be all behind the scenes, and prefixes like "The ", "A ", "Le ", "La ", "Les ", etc, would automatically get handled based on the language of the entry. However, as a quick workaround (for Latin alphabet based languages at least), the set of prefixes should at least be configurable (I watch a lot of French programming, and stripping off French prefixes would be really nice). I've got a patch done that allows this, with the set of prefixes currently hard-coded. It shouldn't be too difficult to make the configuration database driven. Chhamilton 9:18 AST, 16 January 2006.
  • In the playbox, sort recorded files by title and subtitle. Because some seasons indicate there episode like this format title-subtitle. An Example:"SG-Atlantis-03x01 No nan's land" --Matop 02:01, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I write a new playbackbox.cpp based on gentoo-portage-mythtv-0.20-p11626 this patch is very dirty, because it comment-out a if-clause , indicate with FIXME. [1] --Matop 01:34, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Move configuration settings for each frontend out of the backend server database and into a config file on the frontend side. IMO, only backend settings should be stored in the backend database. -- Won't be implemented (But you can get what I assume you want (multiple configurations per frontend). Create a copy of your ~/.mythtv directory, and change the "LocalHostName" in the mysql.txt configuration file in the new directory. Now just run "cd ~/new_directory" before running mythfrontend.) -- dtk
  • make screenshot. See changeset [12908]
  • 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
  • User-definable button labels for on-screen help, so MythTV can be configured to give help based on the design of remote the user is actually using.
  • Change LiveTV so that when you select record while watching a program the contents of the LiveTV buffer back to the start of the program is added to the start of the recording, thus giving you a potentially complete program
Already default behavior in MythTV
  • When changing channels in live tv on a multiple recorder system, if a free recorder is available continue to record previous channel for a customisable period thus allowing revert to the previous channel while keeping the live tv buffer.
  • A more robust system of handling errors in menu XML files (IE, damaged item doesn't appear, or an error screen pops up, instead of simply crashing).
  • Multiple Network Control Servers or Perl bindings - The idea is this, if I receive an e-mail while watching tv, I would like to see the from line and subject line scroll across the bottom of the screen (which I can do using mythtvosd). However, if I'm not actively in a playback mode, the OSD is not shown. As a result I used the network control server to query the location (to get the current mode). This disconnects any other network control clients I have and is not an ideal solution. As such proper perl bindings to the front end, or multiple network control consoles would facilitate a much better solution.
    • Implemented in 0.22
  • How about just having the mythtvosd shown everywhere in Myth, even menus, etc? I use it for showing me caller ID info, and it would be handy to see even if I'm on a menu, or using MythVideo, etc.
    • Planned UI widget for 0.23
  • When searching for upcoming recordings, there is currently the ability to search by a single category at a time. It would be nice to have the option to save your favorite categories, and then be able to search all your favorite categories at once.
  • Ability to add viewers to mythtv along with a popup at the end of the recording to mark a recordings as viewed by any number of users. This way recordings can be deleted once all viewers have watched it. Possibly an addition to recording schedules to mark users who want to view that show. This will help multiuser households to manage old recordings and recording storage, especially on systems with many tuners. -- Partially implemented (This is partially implemented in SVN but won't be per-user until the framework for multiple users is introduced somewhere in the future) --GBee 21:09, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Multi-user support sounds awesome. Saving different bookmarks for different people would also be helpful. This would let me save where I was up to in a show by pressing the red button, and my wife can save where she was up to in the same show by pressing the blue button. May be other solutions to this?
  • As well as the "Watch List" group, include a "Partly Viewed" group showing all items that have been bookmarked. I wrote a SQL trigger hack for this, but it moves the bookmarked item to a new category, so the user gets confused when it's not in the category they found it in the first time. Would be better if it was a virtual group like Watch List. --harvest316
  • Ability to record both primary and SAP (Second Audio Programming) [in analogue recordings]* and choose which stream to listen to OR have this option be configurable when scheduling a recording. (* Already possible with digital)
    • Not possible, would require a complete second tuner to capture the secondary audio program.
  • Provide a wizard for setting filter parameters in the trascoder profile setup.
  • Allow new transcoder profiles to be created.
  • Control MythTV with BlueTooth on your Mobile/PDA, and even see the menu, options, what song/film is playing... It'll need a J2ME application on mobile.
    • Various mobile control programs are available using the Telnet_socket. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Add the 'cardid' field to the recorded table, so it can be determined which card(tuner) was used to make a recording. This is useful information for maintaining _quality-control_ of back ends with multiple cards having different tuners with different sensitivities, that affect recording quality. This information only needs to be in the DB not in a UI.
  • Auto play following content - If the user is watching a recording of a particular channel, and MythTV has also recorded the show that followed on that same channel, don't stop at the end of the first show. Play the second (and subsequent) ones straight after, automatically so the user doesn't have to go back to menu and select it manually. This is good for back-to-back episodes. Also for when a station has slipped it's schedule but you happened to record two shows in adjacent time slots anyhow (you won't get the end chopped of the first, because it's inside the following timeslot you happened to record).
    • Hooloovoo It would probably make more sense to play the next episode of that program automatically than the following show for the first use case (which I wouldn't want it to do, as I don't usually have time to watch more than one show. The second use case would be much better dealt with by the suggestions to automatically send the overlapping recording from the tuner card to two different files.
  • Setup menu cleanup. The configuration options available for Myth can be a bit overwhelming, making it difficult to understand or find desired options. Some things I think would improve this are: (1)Mirror all config options in MythWeb, complex menus can be more easily navigated in a web interface. Help information and searches would also help. (2) Add an "advanced" option, and classify each item as standard or advanced, allowing you to hide a large percentage of infrequently used options. (3) Re-organize menu items to logical groups. It seems like the menus grew organically, and it's hard to find some items.
  • Support for small LCD/VFD Displays (like the 1 line / 9 character VFD on the Aopen EA65). I (KAFE) added a patch for this to #3864. The display then shows the highlighted menu item while navigating or the channel name in TV mode or the artist/track info in mythmusic.
  • Audio Delay / Lipsync Control - The current audio delay in the frontend allows for temporary adjustment to align the audio with the video. Unfortunately, many HDTV owners experience a problem where the audio is about 30-40ms ahead of the video due to the 30-40ms delay that modern HDTV video processors create. While the temporary audio delay controls already implemented in the Myth frontend can help, it would be beneficial to allow a permanent baseline audio delay to be set amongst all recordings. That way, by default the audio could be delayed by 30-40ms, which will align it for most programs, allowing minor adjustment via the temporary audio delay to not always be necessary. #6581
  • Add an on-screen-keyboard to the "Program Finder". As it exists right now, finding a program through the program finder requires a Page Up and Page Down remote-binding to be useful. Allowing adding more than just one letter to the search will make this more useful. This functionality is currently provided by the "Search Words" screen, however this is not intuitive to users of other media centers.
  • Built-in calibration images to setup video levels for recordings/mythvideo/dvd etc.
  • Support for selecting audio tracks for transcoding: At the moment, it's only possible to select the compression, but not the tracks, i'd prefere to select one or more tracks for encoding bacause in my country the most movies over DVB-T are sent with two language tracks.
  • Nvidia GPU temperature display. From the nvidia-settings package, it appears that NvCtrlGetAttribute(handle, NV_CTRL_GPU_CORE_TEMPERATURE, &core) returns an int representing the GPU core temperature. Adding this to the same places that display the CPU temperature seems to make sense.
  • Along the same lines, hard drive temperature display. The smartmontools package, among others, can display this information. Adding this to the same places that display the CPU temperature seems to make sense.
  • A "Downloaded TV" section under the TV section (basically a separate instance of MythVideo for downloaded TV).
    • Video content is video content. What do you care about the source? You *can* always separate it out yourself in MythVideo using different folders. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
    • Maybe integrate recordings and mythvideo so that you have one media section that combines them so that you can have a series/season with mixed recorded and downloaded shows and have a section for movies. This would work better so that if you have a downloaded episode and recorded of the same show they will in the same location. [Dolcraith]
  • The ability to view/browse YouTube videos, hard work to make it myth friendly.. but nice.. -- UKDude
    • A MythTube plugin exists, however was abandoned somewhere during the 0.22 development process. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
    • The current MythBrowser plugin now supports flash and flash video players. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Add the option to "autohide" the mouse after it doesn't move a configurable number of seconds, or 5, if thats easier :) --bflong
  • Locale-aware sorting option (e.g. in lists, sort "Episode 9" before "Episode 10")
  • Make it clear on the setup screens which options affect the backend and which affect the frontend
    • e.g. database logging appears between audio setup (obviously frontend) and mythfilldatabase setup (probably backend) - which is it?
  • Support the importing of Apple Lossless format music files.
  • Connecting recordings and video. Recordings will expire, videos are kept. I would like to easily move a recording into the video section via the menu and have the file automatically transferred and renamed. Barbex 14:33, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Ability to add "permanent overrides" to recording rules instead of adding overrides to just one showing. This could be implemented by adding one more option to add override menu to choose if the override applies to only one showing, all showings with the same title, all showings in this time slot, etc.
  • A combined information view which combines existing plugins onto one screen - one place for RSS news, weather, a block for live TV, rolling stock qoutes - 'my world at a glance'
  • Add .ical support to mythweb so that calendars that support external .iCal feeds (most of them) can show what is scheduled to record. (Essentially a read-only ical of scheduled recordings.)
    • Already done
  • Add the ability to save multiple bookmarks both in recordings and videos. This is particularly useful for multi-user scenarios. Additionally the use of a thumbnail per bookmark so that the users place in the recording/video can be easily found. I have a PVR with this function and it is SORELY missed on the mythbox. Thanks.
  • Add a menu option to turn on display of the time and date in the corner of the main menu screen. When at the main menu (the most likely place to be), the only easy way to get the time is to dig down into 'Schedule Recordings'->'Program Guide'. Some people may not want the time/date always showing on the main menu (like it doesn't show now), so it should be off by default, with a general menu option to turn on its display.
    Adding a flag/option within Myth to turn this on or off might be some work, but myth already supports showing the date by changing or customizing a theme. For example, Project Grayhem both displays the time, as does Metallurgy, which also gives you the date.
  • NOT forcing all frontends to use the same mythvideo database. I have 3 frontends and they all have to be configured EXACTLY the same way or every time I scan for new content they mess up the database if they aren't all mounting things the exact same way!
    • Why would you want to have different content on different frontends? As a side note, videos and images for MythVideo are now pushed through the backend, so directories do not need to be mounted locally.
  • Netflix WatchNow - I am looking to switch from GBPVR to MythTV and one great Plugin GBPVR has is the Netflix WatchNow Plugin; it's Beta but works very well. Viewing the list of shows is difficult but I was able to watch the First Season of 30 Rock without any issues. They used the RSS feature to access the account and download the movies.
  • Optional input metod on textedit object, using T9 [2] and a prediction text input on multimple languajes.
  • When using edit mode to set cut points before transcoding out commercials, often there will be a number of frames of black, but to get the cut right, I need to know the audio levels in the frames. It would be really helpful if there were an audio graph that covers several frames in each direction above the edit bar showing the cut points.
  • Add ability for mythtv to set list of keywords that disable recording of show, which title or description includes that word. e.g. many Finnish programs description says "rerun"/"Renewals", this show is already been shown, and many times mythtv records this rerun show cause descriptions doesn't match with the original one.
  • MythFrontend Local Recordings - Allow a frontend, such as a laptop, to copy recordings (or a transcoded copy of a recording) from a backend into a local recordings directory along with all of it's data and playback these recordings from within the recordings section on mythfrontend. Of course this would require some sort of frontend setting db (cached or otherwise), I'd imagine either an xml file or a sqlite db.
  • Better integration with widgets would be nice, easier ways to share screen space with things like clocks, email notifier, IM contacts, and also be able to scale TV to 80-90% and free up space for tickers or dialogues. pip for a web browser, sharing the display between 2 users, one watching TV, the other using the web. Screenlets helps with some of this, but usability could be improved.
  • The ability to import more than one .xml file in mytharchive. You can export as many as you want, it would be awesome if you could import them the same way.
  • Allow the user to declutter schedules by hiding 'known' programs. See Known program feature for full explanation.
  • Edit Keys: Ignore a keypress for a Jump Point if you're actually in that Jump Point. e.g. If you press the key for the "Live TV" Jump Point and are already watching Live TV then either ignore the keypress or use the same key within the Live TV context as a higher priority. Possibly the same functionality could be implemented by changing the priority of Jump Points to be lower than other contexts? This feature would allow MCE style remote controls to use the Live TV and Guide buttons to both summon up TV / Guide from anywhere in the frontend and to bring up the Guide or fullscreen Live TV from within Live TV, if you attempt this at the moment, the Guide key goes into an infinite loop of loading Live TV.
  • Perform intelligent upconverting of Dolby ProLogic Surround Sound (inside MP3/2.0, AC3 2.0 etc.) to discrete 5.1 channels. This is to assist those TV stations (very common in Australia) that broadcast only a two channel sound stream but this sound stream is Dolby ProLogic encoded. By upconverting to discrete channels, the user no longer needs to change the mode of their surround sound/dolby digital amplifier to force decoding of Dolby Prologic. Similarly, when they want to listen to music (2 channels) they do not need to change their amplifier back from dolby prologic back to a stereo mode. They just leave their amplifier on automatic detection and, with SPDIF, it will output on just the channels it needs to do so. See http://matrix-mixer.sourceforge.net/ for an open source solution in this area.
  • Hooloovoo: Make more use of coloured buttons on remote controls. Nearly all remotes have the same colour keys (red, green, yellow, blue and (R)) and, for the ones that do not, it could be set. One of the real strengths of MySky is that you can achieve nearly everything without entering a menu -- the four key options are displayed on the screen next to the colour button and you simply push that button to get "series link"/+24hrs/-24hrs on the EPG screen etc., but those same buttons give you (and the screen tells you that they give you) "delete recording" etc. in "Watch Recordings".
MythTV is currently designed to use a minimal remote of a 4-way, select, escape, menu, and info. There are already a lot of vocal users complaining about that requirement, in favor of a 7 or 6 button remote. Far more are using remotes without such colored buttons. That said, a number of screens implement something very similar using the number keys.
  • Hooloovoo: Playback of recordings could start at the time the recording was scheduled to start and any extra time that one schedules (to ensure that the beginning isn't missed) could be available in the buffer if, and only if, the user was forced to rewind to see the beginning. This would presumably require something to be inserted in the recording by the backend.
Are you proposing some form of scheduled start of a LiveTV session? MythTV is designed such that you don't watch when the show is on the air, but at some point later at your leisure. Additionally, the LiveTV buffer was removed several years ago with LiveTV now behaving as a recording, storing the entire session straight to disk.
No, Hooloovoo is asking for regular recordings to begin playback where the scheduled start time would have begun. So if the user has set the recording to start 2 minutes before the scheduled start time, then playback would jump to 2 minutes after the start of the recording. As most programs will rarely start early the user wont have to fast forward to the start of the program as much, but they can still rewind when the program does start early.
  • Hooloovoo: Put the name of the day in the top-left corner of the EPG -- often the day is more important than the date.
  • Hooloovoo: The "Delete Recordings" screen should show how much space would be left if all deleted-but-not-expired shows were expired. The reason that I go into the screen is to decide whether I need to delete files to make more space and in those circumstances deleted-but-not-expired is equivalent to gone.
  • Hooloovoo: A new recording option for weekly recording at approximately that time. The problem with time-based recording settings are that they don't deal with schedule changes like a two-hour finale. The problem with title-based options is that they catch other (rerun) series that aren't related. Normally, for me, a series would include any shows on that day of the week that start within two hours of the start time and end within two hours of the end time.
This can already be accomplished using the Custom Record screen.
  • Hooloovoo: The "Upcoming Recordings" screen should show the actual time that the show will go from and to, applying all overrides and "end x mins early" etc.
  • Hooloovoo: Overall, I would like to see MythFrontend move to using GStreamer. I realise that it is unlikely, but it would be great for being able to buy legal codecs in countries that have patents. It would mean that transcoding could benefit from Transmageddon/Arista work, MythArchive could benefit from the work on programs like Brasero (which I find a lot more reliable). More importantly, it would allow MythTV to focus on what it is brilliant at, which is creating a great user interface to all this power. It could then leave codec development to GStreamer.
MythTV is fairly tightly integrated with FFMpeg and its libavcodec. Switching to GStreamer would require vast rewrites of the code, likely exceeding the work required for the QT3 to QT4 migration.

Decoding Hardware

  • 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

This is a task better handled by VLC... -- dtk
  • 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 possibility of a truly remote mythfrontend - like one hooked up at a friend's apartment, which uses the storage and tuner of a backend elsewhere.
This is a task better handled by VLC... -- dtk
There would be a considerable benefit to having an actual mythfrontend UI for some applications rather than just using the mythstreamweb. VLC could be a good engine for transcoding the video in real-time, but it would be nice to integrate the functionality into a frontend-like UI without being trapped inside the browser... -- jrandall
  • Support the Sigma Designs HD decoder. It can do MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding, making the CPU requirements on the frontend extremely low. There is a project to reverse engineer Linux drivers for the MyHD line of cards, based on the Teralogic Janus design, which includes an HD MPEG2 decoder. Theoretically, it would behave just like a PVR-350, but with full HD support.
Until there is a driver for MythTV to use, this isn't really a MythTV feature request.. -- dtk
  • support for the DXR3/Hollywood+ MPEG-Decoder. There exists already a plugin for xine. MPEG-decoding is already supported with PVR-350, so this schould be no big deal.
  • Ability to access and subscribe to Miro channels for auto program downloads, access joost and other streaming media sources
This is addressed by MiroBridge.

Menu Mode

  • A LAN based Video Intercom System (MythVideoCom?) - This would allow users to call up any Mythfrontend box from any other Mythfrontend box on the same LAN and have a video chat using webcam and microphone. Why is this a good idea? Well if I am in my office working and my wife is in the kitchen and needs to ask me something, she can just use mythfrontend to do it. Embedding the whole thing within Myth would simply add continuity as opposed to just having a menu button which opens a 3rd party application. This would make a very useful plugin. I would propose it has its own menu screen with a list of nodes (each one being a mythfrontend box) and a setup screen to add the nodes based on IP.
This can already be done with asterisk and MythPhone.
Starting with 0.22, MythPhone has been dropped as an official plugin due to lack of interest.wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
I think there is interest for MythPhone with 0.22 (at least for me DellaM0rte)
Interest in use is not sufficient, there has to be interest in maintaining it, and currently none of the developers are willing to spend the time to do so. If people want to continue using it, there is nothing stopping one of them from grabbing an old copy off subversion, and picking up maintenance. wagnerrp 14:04, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Ah I see, it's interest in (spending time for) the development. Since MythTV is open source, one should resect this. The developers are doing great jobs. Thanks a lot! Did anyone start with the development of the qt4-port before breaking up the maintenance? DellaM0rte 16:07, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
  • 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.
  • a summary of HDD free (approx hh:mm or size/GB or %free) on main menu or top of every menu.
    • Up to the theme. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • 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.
The menu items can be changed by editing the theme.xml *-ui.xml files.
  • 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.
  • A simple DVD slowdown menu thingie (hdparm -E x /dev/dvd coupled to some remote button or something). When playing ordinary dvd's all is well but when i input a data-DVD mounted by subfs xine (or mplayer) does not

LiveTV / View Recording

  • Series/Episode Tracker: Enable the frontend to show which seasons/episodes for a series has been recorded (and which have not). In addition, show which ones that have been recorded have been watched. Data could be retrieved from sources like ttvdb or similiar. This would be very useful for not only new series which someone is keeping up on (and might have missed an episode i.e., due to tuner failuer), but could be especially useful for watch syndicated re-runs of shows which do not run in season/episode order to show how much of the series has been watched.
  • Sort/Filter by Season/Episode
  • Sort groups and categories before recordings, i.e. when showing both groups and individual recordings, everything is sorted in alphabetically order. Having the groups always on top, maybe with a separator below, is more intuitive.
Not under MythTV control, see themer for layout considerations.
  • An iTunes-like column interface for recordings that incrementally filters all recordings by picking filters from filter lists. First there is a list of available filters (groups, categories, years, directors, whatnot) and a list of all recordings below. If I pick a filter category, I get a list of all filter values in that category. If I pick a value, I again get a list of all left-over filter categories, and below the list of recording that match the current filters, etc.
  • Adding the ability to totaly add/amend to the OSD menu, rather than the (rather nice, but a bit limited) pre-configured choices. Dchurch 12:21, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Add a option to the "mythtv would like to record such and such" popup to switch to another tuner(i.e: "Record and switch to another input" in addition to the current choices of recording and watching, recording and going back to the main menu, and not recording)
  • Output video color information (UDP maybe?), for DIY ambient lighting using LED strips. This is similar to Philips Ambilight, which is claimed to be more immersive, and can reduce eye strain.
  • Show commercial flags on the OSD. Maybe just break up the position bar with a different color to show where the commercials are. I believe mytharchive has the same kind of display to show the cut list. BeyondTV has a similar feature that changes the color of the progress bar where the commercials have been flagged. It makes it really easy to see how accurate the commercial flagging likely is before you jump the commercials. --(mrmagoo)
  • Commercial lead-in. When using Commercial skip play a few seconds of the commercial so you not left wondering if the flag was correct. Same idea as "Commercial Skip Auto-Rewind Amount" only for the start of the commercial brake.
  • Add channel number default completion. Digital channel numbers are typically of the form "channelnum_subchannel". Eg, "12_1", "12_2", "12_3" etc. Currently, if you only enter "12" and there is no channel 12 available, it does nothing. It would be nice if it would default to the first subchannel; eg, entering "20" on the remote would default to "20_1". Since many remotes don't have a "_" button, this would greatly improve usability.
  • A better 4:3 to 16:9 Zoom, like modern Televisions offer
    • Zoom modes already exist. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Add more filters and postprocessing options - such as resize and Lanczos to sharpen Standard Definition live tv (UK channels aren't broadcasting in MPEG-2 HD over DVB-T)
  • Add another recording option to show a reminder via mythtvosd. This could be another selection in the list with 'Record only one showing', et al. as 'Remind Only'. For those who use mythtv primarily in LiveTV mode, this would be useful.
  • Have it so while viewing live tv or recordings that a user can go into other menus without stopping the recording or live tv, somewhat like Xbox Media Center does.
  • provide opengl output to make it work with xgl (it is possible with NO_XV=1 but it is slow)
If you use the latest nVidia drivers XVideo has been fixed to work with the composite extension in Xorg 7.1. -- dtk
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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".
  • 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.
This is in SVN for release in 0.20, the default is 8 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.
    • A congressional bill may make this a non-issue (in the US anyway). wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
    • You're using MythTV, a PVR. Use that skip button. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Ability to take a snapshot of the current frame, maybe to press R whilst paused to take a snapshot of the current frame. See [12908]
  • Enable browsing channels across tuners.
    • Already exists as an option. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • 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 forward 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 until finished. Comm flagging could be used as a hint for where to start looking for the cut points.
You can load the commercial map into the editor using the 'Z' key. -- dtk
  • 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.
  • 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. Even a more basic filtering system would work, where the system reads in the CC segment, searches it for any profanity and mutes the audio until the next segment of CC arrives
  • Have a minimum time limit to save a LiveTV recording (in minutes ?). Thus "channel surfing" would not produce hundreds of LiveTV recordings.
Impossible (You must save the recording in order to be able to show it. If the recording is less than a couple minutes it is automatically deleted to avoid producing too many LiveTV recordings. Changing the recording group will hide all these recordings as well.) -- dtk
  • When selecting a channel from the program guide which is already being recorded, jump into the recorded stream at the most recent point rather than tying up another tuner recording the same stream. This would also enable eg rewinding to before the start of the LiveTV selection.
  • Matroska chapter support (jump to next, prev chapter) with 'Internal' player
  • MythVideo + Internal player remembers playback position
  • Ability to customize OSD menu through OSD themes. So that e.g. unnecessary OSD menu items can be easily removed or hidden.
  • use of ffmpeg's new swscaler to scale DVD's/SD recordings/random MythVideo files to HDTV resolutions (720p/1080p).
  • For HDTV, instead of modifying the video playback overscan (ruining 1:1 mapping of the source), allow for defining the width/height/offset for the OSD's so they can properly fit on the screen.
  • When changing the teletext page, visually allow to know the numbers are changing. Now you can not tell, as the numbers doesn't change until you press the three.
  • Event notifications to be passed to a script when watching LiveTV and input from a script to allow for dynamic menues for simple expansion and customizations. Some examples: When watching a DVB source and you do not get a lock send the event to a script that then can either do a chan-rescan or do disable of that channel, or when watching analog or digital and a new program starts send a start-notification to a script and the script can then do whatever like send a SMS if it's a reminder, flash some cool lights or raise the volume or whatever. For the menues you could customize a menu where you could do all sorts of stuff for the specific viewing like change resolution or have some app that analyses the video/vbi data to check if it's a 4:3/16:9 transmission and then set the card to the correct mode or other such stuff. Ie, it would add to the customization for the "hackers" that are not too familiar with mythtv while still keeping things simple.Easiest way to do this would simply be to add a action_event() function that could be called from wherever in the code with whatever args you want and then the function would call the script via either an exec and wait for the script to complete or do a pthread_create and dispatch this event as a thread.
  • Aspect override for a program. For example I may want 4:3 zoom for all Battle Star recordings, and 4:3 for CSI.
  • Sound Leveling Option - When active would maintain volume at the same level during commercials and program breaks. It would keep you from having to keep changing the volume control when viewing live TV.
  • Allow 'Sleep Mode' to exit not only live TV/Recording playback but also mythtv completely, this allows mythwelcome to shutdown the system when the sleep time is hit.
  • Provide for 'One Touch or Single Click' Recording. Maybe a predefined hot spot on the screen or a keystroke combo maybe for instantaneous recording of anything currently playing on hte screen. It's a nice feature with the Hauppauge Software.
  • When you hit the record button while LiveTV has been paused past the end of the show, record the show that is paused, not the show that is currently being Live TV'd
Genuine Bug (Please report to Trac) --GBee 09:06, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
  • An option to copy/move recordings(single or entire series) to MythVideo with a dialog to edit metadata(cover image etc.)
    • Exists as user job. [3] wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • I would like to see episode numbers displayed (when available) so I can better guage when i'm watching a program if i've missed one. This works well with the "sorting by episode number/program ID" feature.
  • Improve "current position bar" by adding vertical lines in increments of 5-15 minutes. Instead of a simple bar that grows, it should have some indication of scale like a thermometer. This would would make it much more visually useful.
  • I would like to have separate deinterlace filters defined for SD and HDTV content. With HD content, bob works best for me, but for SD content kernel looks much better.
    • Already exists. Multiple rules can be set based off video resolution. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • It would be nice to have an option of applying Dynamic Range Compression to the audio so that I don't have to turn the volume up during speech and back down again during action. I think some Amps have a feature like this for night time viewing so that you don't have to disturb your neighbours.
  • Reverse karaoke mode - Increase the volume of speech while mostly leaving the rest of the soundtrack at normal volume.
  • Configurable skip direction for CHANNELUP/CHANNELDOWN when watching a recording; currently CHANNELUP is hardcoded to skip backward and CHANNELDOWN is hardcoded to skip forward, which maps well to a computer "document paging" ui, but seems backwards in a DVDs channel skip ui
  • RSS feed OSD in live TV mode, this would be really nice if you could press a button and popup a small OSD showing a selected RSS feed. That way you could check the current weather without stopping the current recording. You could also use this for a stock ticker with the feed from yahoo finance.
  • Bluetooth cell phone OSD popup. I think it would be really cool if Mythtv connected to my cell phone via bluetooth. That way if someone calls while I'm watching TV a small OSD comes up showing the Name and number of the caller. As a bonus you could also make it so that user can accept the call which would pause the current show and allow the user to take the call.
    • There is an exceedingly complex workaround involving Asterisk, chan_mobile, and mythphone
  • MUCH faster channel change, in the realm of a few seconds. Perhaps the option for users to chose whether they want a long rewind time.
    • Cannot be done. MythTV has an internal buffer of ~2 seconds. Hardware encoder cards have a multiple second buffer. Digital tuner cards have a short buffer. Analog tuner cards take a second or two to lock a channel, digital tuners can take much longer. Slow channel change is simply typical behavior for DVRs. wagnerrp 21:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Ability to fine tune a channel's frequency while watching TV.
  • Ability to watch live TV while watching a recording (like picture in picture (PIP)).
    • MythTV 0.22 can do this. --Pepsiman 12:52, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Auto zooming based on blackbar detection. (Without messing with the aspect ratio).
  • Bookmark all viewing attributes like time stretch, manual zoom, audio sync, video scan, and anything else that might be appropriate.
  • Allow the option to automatically have a 3 second fast-forward through commercial breaks (to complement the auto-skip) and fast forward at a non-linear rate so the start and end of the commercial break are fast forwarded much slower than the middle. This is to help detect false positives with the commercial detection algorithms.
  • Allow an OS script to be run when a recording, video or live TV playback starts and stops. This would allow a script to change the processor speed to avoid the problems seen with VDPAU and AMD chips with PCI-Express bandwidth when running throttled. Since playback with VDPAU hardly uses any CPU power, the OS will not increase the processor speed itself. Currently users are limited either to forcing the processor speed minimum artificially high (1.8GHz on a processor that can run at 1GHz,) disabling throttling all together, or seeing jerky playback with VDPAU.

UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) server and client features

All UPnP AV (UPnP = Universal Plug and Play Protocol, and AV = Audio/Video) connectivity and communication protocols to make MythTV be fully UPnP compliant on both the back-end (server) side and the front-end (client) side. So that both MythTV's back-end and front-end is intercooperative with other UPnP servers and clients, (then especially other HTPC applications, both open sourced ones and closed source commersial ones, thus the end-user can choose the best 'back-end' and the best 'front-end' which suits their needs, like a MediaPortal back-end, or a XBMC front-end togther with MythTV). For more information see MythTV developers notes on UPnP.

Note! UPnP could be implemented one or more native feature(s) or one or more plugin(s):
  • UPnP AV MediaServer - which is the UPnP-server (a 'slave' device) that share/stream media-data (like audio/video/picture/files) to UPnP-clients on the network). Now a UPnP AV MediaServer has already been implemented into MythTV back-end but the code classes could be updated according to the v2.0 specifications to be UPnP v2 compliant.
  • UPnP SSDP Discovery Service in both MythTV back-end and front-end to make the MythTV and MythTV auto-discover each other. If not into to both then at least into the MythTV front-end to let it (and other UPnP-clients) auto-detect the MythTV back-end over a local-network.
  • UPnP Remote User Interface (RUI) server/client (in MythTV back-end and front-end respectivly) - which recieves/sends control-commands beween the UPnP-server and UPnP-client over network, (like record, schedule, play, pause, stop, etc.). With UPnP RUI in both MythTV back-end and front-end, the front-end can control/command the back-end via UPnP, and since UPnP is a standard other 'front-ends' which also feature UPnP RUI can also control/command the MythTV back-end, and the MythTV front-end can control/command other 'back-ends' if they feature UPnP RUI.
  • UPnP MediaServer ControlPoint - which is the UPnP-client (a 'master' device) that can auto-detect UPnP-servers on the network to browse and stream media/data-files from them. Should be implemented into
  • UPnP MediaRenderer DCP - which is a 'slave' device that can render content.
  • UPnP RenderingControl DCP - control MediaRenderer settings; volume, brightness, RGB, sharpness...).

Captions / MHEG / Subtitles

  • Automatically turn on CC / subtitles when LiveTV is muted, sometimes called QuickCaps apparently.
  • Perform OCR on DVB subtitles and store the resultant text somewhere (with the recording, named .txt?) and provide an interface to search for quotes.
  • Subtitle offset. If you are watching a 4:3 movie with black borders and using zoom in order for the image to fit/not get distorted on a widescreen tv sometimes the subtitles end up offscreen. For instance when the subtitles are transmitted to overlay the black borders which are not visible due to the zooming. It would be nice to be able to move the subtitles so that they actually show on screen.
  • Subtitle type/toggle remembered between Internal player sessions. At the moment, if subtitles are turned on in the Internal player, then the player is quit and the same recording or a different recording started, subtitles will be turned off. There is a setting under Playback OSD for "Always display closed captioning or subtitles" which will always turn on the subtitles when the player is started, even if they were turned off previously, but this isn't always what you want. My suggestion is to remove the configuration setting, and have the Internal player remember whether subtitles were turned on when the player was quit (and which subtitle type was selected if several), and to restore the subtitle settings when the player is restarted. Much simpler for the user, easily discoverable, and has the benefit of removing a config option. Pelago 22:23, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Multiple subtitles per video. You can only use 1 subtitle file now, as it has to be the same file name (except the .srt) as the movie file. Why not let it detect the same files with a "-dutch" or "-english" tag? Example: "Movie.avi" would use subtitle "Movie-dutch.srt" and "Movie-english.srt". -- Apparantly, it *does* look for these files, but it will only load the first file which it can parse correctly.
  • Allow time-stretch of subtitles, at least proportional to playback timestretch, preferrably independent. (tested using dvb-t in Norway, may be a bug, but subtitles stay on-screen for short time even when playback is slowed down) Submitter: hakon, Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:17:22 +0000