Feature Wishlist (Plugin Addons)

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This article represents a subsection of the Feature Wishlist.


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Plugin Addons (to existing Plugins)

Overall

  • Provide a direct link between a component's Live menu and it's Setup menu. In other words, if I'm in "Listen To My Music" and I need to get to "Music Setup" to configure the directories or rebuild the collection I have to navigate back through half a dozen menus! ESC, ESC, down, down, down, down, ENTER, down, down, down, ENTER, ENTER. Then repeat everything in reverse to get back to "Listen To My Music". This is *particularly* painful when setting up and then testing things in MythGame. It would be so much easier if there was an shortcut to jump to the setup and back for that component.
Many plugins already behave in this manner.
  • The ability to integrate the other plugins to work with removable storage. For instance, to play videos/music/pictures off an inserted flash drive. I'm not sure if there would be an easy way to do this, but I'm thinking some sort of dynamic storage group that detects newly created devices folders in the /media/ directory (on ubuntu, this is where removable storage is automatically mounted), or perhaps just a way to browse the filesystem and play content without having to setup new scan directories, re-scan and re-build the database. One issue to attend to is removable storage inserted before mythTV starts (if you follow the idea monitoring the /media/ directory as a means of detecting removable storage). A separate database could be possibly created on the removable device for metadata/fanart/etc.
The plan is to have no plugins work with removable storage, and to migrate everything to storage groups. The user would then run a backend or mediaserver on any machine that accepted removable storage, which would manage the content, and allow access to any connected frontend.

MythBrowser

  • Pop-up keyboard for text input on web pages, controllable from a simple remote control (like the keyboard used in all other parts of myth).
  • Allow pasting urls into the "add bookmark" screen
  • Option to hide images and flash from a page

MythGallery

  • Add EXIF display option for photos in myth's photo gallery.
  • Add ability to define extension types to activate specific command line for a given extension. Like MythVideo.
  • Aspect Ratio key to zoom and stretch the picture to fit widescreen TV's
  • Print option to photo on local printer
  • Confirm deleting pictures or maybe using a Trash bin system - images can easily be deleted by accident using this plugin.
  • Display filenames underneath thumbnails as caption.
  • Hide or option to hide folder.png/jpg/gif images in gallery.
The folder.png files are something used by the Video Library. Why are you mixing your photographs and videos?
As I browse my picture folders, I want to see the folder.png file on the folder icon but I don't want to see the folder.png in the slideshow or in the picture folder. The video library will show the folder.png on the folder icons but not inside the folder because it's not a .avi/mpg/mkv...

External Access

  • Add support for viewing and editing external picture galleries (Flickr, etc...)
  • Add support for automounting of cameras through HAL and Show pictures directly from the connected camera without copying these.
  • Possibility to mount folder from samba (if photos are store on Windows Host)
Mount the paths on your own.
  • Ability to view/delete images from bluetooth device (eg mobile phone). Always sync automatically after initially configured?

Slideshow Effects

  • A PS3 style 3D slideshow. See video.
  • Ability to play a audio file in the background during a slideshow. User should be able to configure a file that will be played in a loop in the slideshow mode. If a photo folder has a slideshow.mp3 file, this file should override the audio file setup by user in the "Setup" page.
  • Add Ken Burns Pan and Zoom Effect to slideshow. See ticket #5176
  • take transition effects from xscreensaver and implement them for myth photo module

MythGame

  • Add simple games that can be played via the remote control (i.e. arrow keys and enter) - like some type of simple minesweeper or sokoban -- i.e. come with some existing (free/open source) games which can then be used as templates for how to set things up.
  • Add a "Game Display Order" option for grouping roms by the First Letter of the Game Title. Example: Airwolf & Arkanoid show up in the "A" category, BurgerTime & BubbleBobble in the "B" category etc...
  • Rather than a screenshot, add an option to display a video of the game in action when browsing (using a user supplied avi or flv file). Many Windows emulator frontends do this now (for instance HyperSpin) and it looks pretty impressive.
Should be easily doable when a replacement video widget is written for the new UI/OSD.
  • Display a picture of the Console being emulated when further up the menu tree.
  • Integrate Java-Webstart-based games, i.e KGS Go client or the JIN chess client.

MythMusic

  • Command line program to perform the "scan for new music"
Would be better to move scanning to the backend, as has been done for MythVideo, at which point a scan can be triggered by a protocol command.
  • Have a "Music Trivia" mode which hides the playing song details until a "Show details" button is pushed. (This seems to exist in myth-0.21, but not quite in the shape of an on-screen "Show details" button. Press the RemoteInfo.png button while in the Play screen.)
  • Instead of going to the settings to select whether mythmusic should browse by artist, genre or albums, just show all three options at the root of the browser: Under "All My Music", the next entry should be "Albums" "Artists" and "Genres": this would make users life much easier and provide a user experience close to the ease of use of iPods!
  • Keybinding for "Put the song at the end of queue". Example: In WinAmp (other letter in Rhyhtmbox or Amarok) you just have to press "q" to put the song in the queue. When you press "q" on an another song, it puts it at the end of the queue.
  • The Music browsing could be implemented like on the iPod (Artists -> Red Hot Chili Peppers -> Stadium Arcadium -> Dani California). Browsing with a hierarchical structure would streamline music browsing and playlist building inside mythTV. Alternately one could browse by album or genre instead of by artist.
  • Browsing by album should be available as a parallel path through the music repository since samplers cannot be selected in total right now (it is not a solution to change the browsing in the setup since then you would lose the artists)
  • The Auto Playlists, including the Smart Playlists, should appear in the All My Playlists listing (they don't as of v0.21). (This might help the browse-by-album question above)
  • For Audiobook-lovers like me this two things would enhance the mythmusic experience by far:
    • Add Sleep-Timer to Mythmusic.
    • Add a Bookmark feature, which allows one bookmark per mp3, so it asks: "Jump or play from beginning?"
  • Store CDDB ID for ripped CDs, 2 for easy fetching of updates from CDDB. (Is this already in? Or even handy?)
  • Add Support for http://last.fm scrobbling like in amarok, for music recommendations.
  • The ability to transfer playlists from one frontend to another. IE: I'm listening to a playlist on a portable frontend and I want to transfer the currently playing music to the entertainment center. Extra points to have the music pick up at the same point in the current track.
  • Somewhat akin to above, add support for a "global" playlist. Where the frontends would sync their playlists and track positions. I realize this may be impractical due to timing and performance differences between frontends, but this _is_ a wishlist.  :) [Playlists can currently be shared - I have playlists that are shared (admittedly I loaded them from a script, which may influence why they are shared). Starting position isn't likely to work well]
  • Download the artist, song, and album information off of Wikipedia like Amarok does. It would be a great way of learning more about the music that is currently playing.
  • Option to have centralized playlists and library instead of each front end having seperate lists. [Can currently be achieved with a file share, and shared playlist. To get a shared playlist you need to manipulate the database - set the hostname field in the music_playlists table to null]
  • When in full screen visualize mode, if the user changes volume, position, or mute have a pop up display showing this action and location.
  • Add support for disc numbers, for song sorting purposes: the value should be read (if exists) from the ID3 tag or the AAC file metadata, stored in the Matadata class, and used for the song sort.
  • Support for multiple sound cards in order to feed multizone/multisource amps. One frontend could provide separate feeds to more than one room for those that don't want to create multiple frontends.
  • Playlist Feature: When while a file is playing, add the ability to either (1) Remove "current track" from "current playlist" or (2) Add "current track" to "alternate playlist A" or "alternate playlist B" etc.
  • Currently, when searching the database, the search is performed for each character input. For a small database, this would be fine, but for large music databases, searching becomes quite laggy. Instead of executing a query after each keystroke, let the user type the entire string and submit the query by pressing enter.
Perhaps a 1/3s input timeout before it starts the search instead.
  • Allow multiple search results to be added to the current queue.
  • ReplayGain support.
  • Automagically download album art.
  • Ability to delete files and folders
  • Apply a crossfading effect when changing to a new song.
  • Allow previewing a track from the edit playlist screen
  • Currently, "CompArtist" seems to be used instead of "Artist" for the menu system (when one is navigating artists). A lot of my music is from compilation CDs and the "CompArtist" is "Various" etc. I have spent a lot of time using MusicBrainz to get complete tags for each track, so it would be great if MythMusic could use the track-specific "Artist" instead of "CompArtist".
  • If a song does not contain info in a certain field in the id tag, there is no reason to print the word "Unknown" on the screen when showing the song info, just skip the field. All my MP3s are not necessarily grouped by albums, so may not have an "Album Title", but currently when showing the song info the word "Unknown" is printed on the screen. To me, this seems distracting.
  • Configurable fast-forward (FFWD)/rewind (RWND) skip interval (currently hard-coded to 5 seconds).
  • Jump forward/back a specified number of minutes, like can be done while watching a TV recording. Useful for long audio files like interviews, podcasts or time-shifted radio programs. I suppose this would need a modifier key so that it doesn't interfere with the existing keybindings, eg. skip forward 10 minutes by pressing ModifierKey-1-0-Right.
  • Smoothly transition from track to track. Currently there is a pause of a second or so.
  • It would be great to be able to listen to music, to select a playlist, to change the behaviour of the player with the remote control and the LCD display only, without powering on the TV.


Supported Formats

  • Support albums stored as a single FLAC file with embedded CUE information defining each track.
Plenty of tools available to losslessly break this up into multiple FLAC files. There is no purpose to preserving the dead space between tracks.
  • Support the importing of Apple Lossless format music files.
  • Implement support for CD+G format using libcdg123
  • 24-bit sound file playback with sampling frequences up to 96 kHz, at least with FLAC decoder.

Music Import

  • When doing an Import CD, list already used genres first in that drop-down. Do this by including each genre from a user's music collection (in the music_genres database table) before the static list of genres which are always listed.
  • Import of iTunes playlists, so you can use playlists you have already setup.
  • Play songs directly from (mounted) USB mp3-player (iPod?)
  • Automatically detect at iTunes-like (DAAP) servers on the LAN, and be able to browse them.
  • Add an option to import playlists for and streaming URL's for internetradio to MythMusic
  • Option for Ripping to occur as a background task/thread (ie start copying the .WAV files to hard disk immediately, put into queue for compressing/encoding). Use MythNotify to prompt the user for verification of CDDB results, etc. Allows ripping while watching TV. It would be nice if this was possible whilst listening to music as well. It would help with parties and people wanting to add their CDs to the mix.
  • Support for purchasing from non-DRM music stores such as eMusic & Amazon.
  • When importing files, allow for errors to listed as one list at the end, not an interrupting message each time.
  • support for magnatune
  • Play media directly from bluetooth device.

External Control

  • 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.
  • Interface with an MPD based backend like ampache ( http://www.ampache.org/ ) - current SVN mythweb has an ampache like interface to the mythmusic collection --Managementboy 10:12, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Add support for queuing music or creating playlists on a front end through Myth Web. This would enable me to use my Nokia N800 internet tablet to queue up music without having to turn the TV on. Play/Pause control would still be supported through regular IR remote methods. Alternatively, create a full-featured remote control client for the Nokia N800/770 -- There is a web based remote (MythRemote) that uses the socket interface of mythfrontend, the PDA pages are compatible with my 770 -- UKDude

Visualization

  • Visualizer that would display song ID3 data over a neutral background and after a configurable time, dim down to prevent burn in. / Galleon-Tivo's version
  • CD Cover Gallery Mode - ie. touchscreen kiosk- Browse by pic of artist -> Album
    • I saw something really cool like this implemented in Hollister Co. (the clothing store that's like Abercrombie) Basically it had a real slick interface with the cover of about 100 CDs they sell in the store, and you can touch any CD cover, choose a song, and it'll start playing it back in the store. I think this is real classy and could be implemented just like the MythVideo Gallery display option. You would require the files to be in some sort of directory structure or sort by ID3 tags but that would probably be slower. I think this should probably be the 1st thing on the development list.
  • Lyrics it would be great to see what those songs really said... I guess you'd have to put some simple timebased scrolling... or go the manual scroll
    • Amarok has a very cool plugin called lrcShow-II that can show synced lyrics in a small OSD window. A similar display wrapped in Myth's own OSD would be ideal. The question is, can Myth's OSD be always-on-top, transparent, yet not steal focus? I'd like to see an option to have the lyrics visible everywhere in MythTV, so that photo galleries or videos can accompany the music + lyrics. Think SUPER-EASY Karaoke setups. There is no Media Center out there that can do this yet.
  • Can we have feature like OSD-lyrics within mythmusic where it displays the lyrics while the song is playing. Also it would be nice to turn the vocals off by muting the channels 1,2 like one mentioned in http://jrharshath.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/how-to-make-karaoke-on-your-ubuntu-box/

mplayer -ao pcm:file=<output file> -af karaoke <input file (song)> , lame -V2 <input wav file> <output mp3 file>

  • Add visualization similar to [http:/figz.com/gdancer gdancer] where figures "dance" to music changes
  • Add a Flickr stream as the visualizer, and for extra points, match the music & image emotion!
    • This can be done already by setting the music going in the background then going to a Web Page or Gallery slideshow.
  • Ability to bring up the display of song/artist info via remote button while in full screen visualization mode.
  • AlbumArt Visualisation Set Display Time: Be able to set the display time of each image stored in the music folder. Default cycles through every half second or so (very fast). Could be set in the set-up menus, or just in a config file.

MythNews

  • Add the ability to feed RSS information to MythOSD with a scroller mode, to accomplish a news-channel-style ticker that can be displayed over other television shows, or even just in the GUI.
  • Similar to above, but perhaps simpler: Ability to pull up MythNews while watching live TV, similar to launching the Program Guide, with LiveTV shown in a small PIP window as when viewing the Program Guide. This would allow us to read news stories while watching live TV during commercials, and we would know when our program comes back on.
  • Honour the http_proxy environment variable, or should allow a http or socks proxy to be set up elsewhere. (also applies to MythWeather) #9525
  • news-sites.xml file updated from MythTV repository(SVN fixes branch?) during launch of news-settings. Would allow URLs to be updated from a central source to remedy dead and changing urls. An accompanying setting to NOT use MythTV online news source.
  • Support for multiple xml files of feeds, and breaking up of current news-sites.xml into logical categories that can conveniently be enabled or disabled.
  • Facility to sync individual xml files from the web - decentralize the maintenance of feed lists. As an example, I have a collection of YouTube "channels" I'd put on my website and advertise for broader consumption.
See Update_bookmarks_from_file for a script to parse in a Firefox-style bookmarks.html.
  • Support a multi-level navigation system for browsing feeds categorically rather than one long list.
  • Improve playing podcast media: make it possible to exit before the media file has finished! (In 0.21 & 0.22, the interface freezes while the file is playing, not possible to exit.)

MythNotify

  • Lots of nice little ideas for MythNotify 2, 3}, most of them pretty 'one of a kind' cases though.
  • Extend mythnotify to allow user input, kind of like zenity.
  • Add ability to pass an xml file that describes how the notify should appear.


MythVideo

  • When playing videos using play folder in mythvideo. You see PLEASE WAIT logo after every video. Is it possible to load the next video in queue while playing the current video or load 2,3 videos in parallel. So as to avoid seeing PLEASE WAIT. I know the wait is not more than 5 seconds in small files but is longer for the HD videos (larger than 512M). and also is distracting as it breaks the continuity of viewing.
  • Ability to set the subtitles directory. Internal plays only subtitles which are in the same folder as a video.
  • Add the ability to render the metadata contained in the Mytharchive exported xml (it creates a recording file and a metadata file) file. This would allow Mytharchive to export a recording to the Mythvideo directory and use the metadata that comes from the program info when the show was originally recorded. Perfect for music specials.
  • Cast photos in metadata.
  • DVD Chapter names, and Matroska Chapter names. It seems other media players connect to a web service to retrieve chapter names based on the DVD. These would be a nice addition to the current "Title 18 of 23" text.
Got a link to this web service?
  • In mythvideo setup, allow a user to define categories, and allow a user to add his collection based on his already-sorted.movies to those categories. Example: If I have a directory called "adult" then mythvideo should automatically assume that every file and every directory underneath that are adult material. The same with DVD movies. I could "mass-add" an entire category of movies soley based on the directory in which these movies reside.
  • Randomize function, in this mode the movies are sorted randomnly instead of by alphabetic order. Also ability to start a random movie. Possibly add an extra item that shows in each folder, which plays a random video from the current folder (or its subfolders)?
  • Similar to the above Randomize request, I think a great addition to the MythVideo plugin would be the ability to "surf" your videos. For instance, say I have 20 or so favorite videos ripped, and just want something to watch. I would love to just hit "MythSurf", and have it jump to a random point in any video tagged as "surf-ready". And every time you hit the MythSurf plugin, it jumps to a random point in a randomly-selected video. It would be like having another cable channel that plays only your favorite movies.
  • Scrolling pages, this mode could be just like "browse view" except that the movie being reviewed changes after a certain amount of time, and not just "jump" but scroll horizontally or vertically at a slow pace, it would be interesting to have this mode randomly select the next movie to display, the advantage of this is that no user intervention is needed so the user doesn't have to actively "reject" a movie also the scrolling sets a pace for browsing so that the user doesn't get bored too quickly
  • View modes unique for different directories, or categories maybe. Essentially looking through directories of movies it would be nice to see the Gallery view to see the tmdb posters, but TV shows just need the browse or list view as no posters are available and number of episodes make the gallery view infeasible.
  • Add a date field to videometadata that defaults to CURRENT_DATE() to record when a video was added to the db. Adjust the filter screen to allow videos to be filtered by date added by specifying a unit (day / week / month) and measure (0-XX); essentially 'WHERE [added] >= DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL @MEASURE DAY)'. This is especially helpful for those with large collections who only want to see the most recently added videos.
    • Already exists
    • but it needs a sort-by-date option in the browser. Right now it sorts alphabetically by however the date string is rendered.
  • Feature to track "Last position" in video overview mode. When watching many series like many of us do its often problematic to remember the exact episode where you stopped watching. It would be usefull if MythVideo would open with the last episode selected. An even advanced version of this would remember all positions in all visited folders. So if the user enters a directory of a series which he havent watched for a while he will instantly know which episode he watched last.Algorithm: 3 Hooks are needed: H1 when the user leaves the video mode. H2 when he enters a dir. H3 when he leaves a dir. H4 when he enters the video mode. 2 methods are needed: M1 when leaving a folder or the video mode (H1+H3). M2 when when entering a folder restoring the last position (H2+H4). The generated tuples, storing absolute path to folder and selected file, can be stored either in the database or the local cache. I would prefer the cache, since the information isnt that important. I ll help where I can with this feature, but i need some directions on the code where to find the stuff I am looking for. Thanks Jan Marc
    • This is possible with the patch from the ticket #7425.
  • Allow users to have a 'fanart.png' to define a background image to be used for a folder, similar to how 'folder.png' works.
  • Enable parsing of playlist files (asx, wvx, pls, m3u, etc) so we can watch live video streams within the Internal player. While there is a workaround to use mplayer or vlc as a workaround, seeing the external window popup doesn't look natural when watching on a TV, and sometimes they can also continue to run in memory if you do not exit the external player properly (i.e. pausing and alt+tab back into the myth-ui instead of pressing escape in mplayer). Another enhancement would be to just allow us to add streaming URLs to the video library, but that might also require playlist support, especially with streams that use session auth codes that can only be generated by using their playlist URL.
Streaming content would better be handled by MythNetvision.
  • Make the Browse Videos screen look just like the Watch Recordings screen. For example, have the left pane show directory names, and the right pane show the files in that directory, so you can keep episodes in directories named for series title. It would seem only a short step after that to combine the Watch Recordings screen and the Browse Videos screen, so that you can see current recordings, and the stuff you have permanently archived in your videos directory, all from the same interface. If they were combined, maybe have an icon indicating whether the Title/Subtitle you are looking at is a current recording, or a directory/filename in your videos directory.
With the new theme engine, it possible for a themer to provide the same look in MythVideo as in recordings. However, do not expect the two screens to ever be merged into one single menu.
  • Support TVDB absolute numbering per-show / series for both metadata pickup and display / playback. The TVDB maintains a hard-line that episodes and seasons are ordered according to the original air date. Some series, however, were originally aired out-of-order (Firefly & Batman the Animated Series are two that come to mind). Support for absolute numbering would allow users to choose which of the two ordering scheme to utilize.
  • Add a sticky boolean field into the database that forbids / allows metadata overwrites for videos. This would allow for a little bit of safety with different metadata grabbers that fail and overwrite good data that someone has already grabbed with a different grabber and is satisfied with.
In 0.23 and previous, metadata grabbing is completely voluntary. The grabbers are only run when you manually request they be run. In trunk (and future 0.24), MythVideo supports a batch metadata search, which uses such a boolean field that only allows the grabber to be run once automatically for an entry.
  • With the change to mythui there is now little functional difference between the various views (Tree, Browser, etc). Collapse this down to a single type internally but allow themes to define as many view windows as they want. Windows can use either a ButtonList or ButtonTree for navigation. Themers can then get as creative as they like with multiple views for different types of media: Movies, TV series, TV episodes. Ideally it should be possible to switch views without losing the current position in the library. This could also work for any other "browse a tree of metadata" plugins such as MythMusic, MythGame or MythGallery.
  • Improve title selection when starting a Bluray disc. At present this is done by choosing the longest title on the disk, which works in some cases but not all. For example, for the film "Up", the longest track is the French version (the English version is just over 30 seconds shorter). The current method is also slow for discs with a large number of titles, with discs such as "Avatar" taking over a minute to begin playback. One possible solution would be to add a field to the database which could be set by the user in the "edit video information" dialog setting the title number to start at per-disc. Another possible solution would be to hash the first title on the disc in some way , and use this hash to look up the best title in a separate text file which could be built up by user submissions. The "best" title is currently selected at line ~100 in BDRingBuffer.cpp
    • Startup speed has nothing to do with the title selection method. The library itself enumerates all the titles on playback. You are seeing long startup speeds because a) Blu-ray startup is slow by nature, and b) because you are most likely using them in storage groups, which has some inefficiencies when it comes to reading many small files. Your feature request will not be handled in the hacky manner which you suggest, but rather by the implementation of Blu-ray menus in the library and in MythTV, which removes the need for title selection entirely.

MythWeather

  • A AccuWeather grabber for MythWeather. I have working perl code lined up, but still need some information to sort stuff out with AccuWeather, see also my message(s) on the myth-dev list.
  • Display the daily forecast of the actual day on the LCD using mythlcdserver
  • Display weather warnings(if any) as see thru marquee while watching recordings. Time span as to how often to display marque to be configurable.
  • Display the daily forecast of the actual day on the MythWelcome screen as widget(see thru widget like when you exit the program)
MythWeather exists only as a frontend plugin, so the data is only downloaded and cached in memory while the frontend is open. Easiest option would probably be to retool MythWeather to pull data and images from the backend using the new metadata and downloadmanager tools, and partially re-implement MythWeather in MythWelcome.
  • Add an image grabber for NOAA hurricane radar tracking.

MythWeb

  • Add an option of HTML5 ogg video playback (ie. tinyvid.tv) in place of flash player.
  • In detail information about each recorded show, the "More:" there is a link for "Search TMDB", "Search TV.com", and "Search Google". There should be a link to Search Wikipedia.
  • Add photo album support to MythWeb (something like JAlbum or gallery)
  • Add option in MythWeb to send a line of text to MythNotify - like a one-way page (probably most useful to add under backend status - where you can see that TV is on, and someone is likely to be in front of TV)
    • Backend Status is not generated by MythWeb, but rather passed through from the backend on port 6544. wagnerrp 22:01, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
    • Better placement would be in the frontend control interface page. wagnerrp 22:01, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Template Engine for Mythweb, for a easier way to create skins.
  • Recognize program categories (in program listing) independantly of interface language (ie 'Doku' should not only show up as documentary when interface is German, ...)
  • Ability to change the job queue (remove a job from the queue, stop a job, etc.)
  • Add a "short" option to the "Recorded Program" view. Omit the image, description and flag list so that each entry is only one or two lines long on the screen, sort of like the "Upcoming Recordings" screen.
  • Add the "original air date" field to the end of the description for each item in the "Recorded Programs" view which has one.
  • Add the "original air date" field as a column to "Recorded Programs" list. This would enable easily watching series shows in order if they were recorded out of order (e.g. reruns) by sorting on the column.
    • Or possibly "Episode Number", if it exists?
  • Ability to use MythArchive through MythWeb, making it a fast way to select recordings.
  • Split the chan-edit page into pages of 30-40 channels per page since when having more than 100-150 channels it becomes horrible slow and above 300 channels it's impossible to do anything useful via that page. And sql-queries, in all their glory, should not be a requirement to modify channel-info :)
  • To simplify the initial setup of mythtv the following ideas might be useful. (all from the chan-edit page)
    • Ability to add the missing channel icons through MythWeb.
    • Button to get a snapshot that opens a new window with an image from that channel so it's easy to identify what channel it is.
    • If you have run a tv_grab of the channels you have via xmltv without having the correct xmltvid's you get a dumb list without any freq's. Skip to display those but use them for a dropdown menu that you then can use to select what a specific channel is, and set the name a and callsign too from the xmltv data too. This should probably be an option since it can still be useful to get a plain list that you just then type in the freq's for the different channels.
mythtv-setup is planned to be moved into the backend web server. The backend web server would handle all of these things.
  • On the "list" page, add a link to list only your favorite channels. Should (?) be a simple fix in the PHP.
  • Add jukebox support to mythweb's mp3act based music implementation, as found in current versions of mp3act -- Messiah
  • Ability to change the channel on an existing schedule, rather than delete it and create a new schedule.
  • Ability to start backend slaves (via wol) when scheduling a new recording. This is useful when you are running the mythweb server on a machine that doesn't have any tv cards.
MythWeb will not function without a running master backend, and the master backend will bring slave backends up for recording as needed.
  • When editing channels it would be nice to have seperate lists per source, show/hide visible channels, show/hide channels without an xml-id, show/hide channels with eit enabled, show/hide channels with ad-free set. Sort by name, xmltvid, channel-number. And also (for those with loads of channels) have an option that limits the number of channels per page.
  • First I jump to a certain day and time, then open a program to enter recording details, and then: When returning to the listings page it should remember the date and time I had jumped to, and not always jump back the the CURRENT day and time (because you generally schedule recordings in the future, so you are continuously jumping days ahead to continue where you were)
  • On searches, add a tickbox next to each hit's description. At the bottom have a dropbox with values such as "Record once" "Record every episode on this channel" etc. Each ticked hit would then be mass-added. Maybe even with a "tick all" box at the top. I would value this highly as I skim through all upcoming programs once a week and currently need to ctrl+click to open each one I want to record.
  • Add metadata views to the video section.
  • Edit recording metadata from the recordings page (eg add an episode number to a recording)
  • Pseudostreaming. Flowplayer has a plugin for pseudostreaming so that you can skip around the timeline even though it has not downloaded to that point. If you click on a later point in the timeline, it just starts buffering from that point, making navigation much more convenient.

MythArchive

  • Add ability to deinterlace MPEG2 files. Let user select this, as some HDTV signals say they are progressive, but they broadcast interlaced in a progressive "wrapper"
  • Add ability to crop video image screen. Some HDTV broadcasters add black bars on the right and left of the older 3:4 format screens to make it fit the HDTV 1080i transmit signal. Allow cropping on right/left and top/bottom of video program. Some older programs have about 6 lines across the top that are not video information.
  • Ability to order the programs in the menu, so that for a series/season the episodes are in order.
  • Although the DVD themes/styles released together with MythArchive are quite pretty and stylish already, the pre-defined menu backgrounds and audio clips might not be suitable for all types of recordings. Hence it might be nice to let the user select from a collection of background images (perhaps taken from MythGallery?) and menu music tracks (from MythMusic?) and dynamically insert the corresponding paths into the selected theme xml file. (In the old MythBurn web interface this was quite easily acomplished by just dropping all your background images and audio clips into the right MythBurn installation directories and re-installing MythBurn, which was, from my point of view, way easier than editing xml files manually...)
    • As an alternative to the above, add support for fanart, banners, screen shorts, and posters to the themes. Then themes could be created with one of these images as the background in either the main menu, the details page, or the chapter menu.
  • Support for splitting large files into several smaller files when burned in native format. I like to burn my HD recordings the same way they were broadcast so as to not loose quality, but can't burn anything larger than ~4GB due to ISO9660 level 3 limitations. Another possible alternative is to add UDF burning support which supports larger files, but I've had troubles with some large files on this too.
  • Remember items which were encoded before (and still exist) and use them rather than re-encoding every show every time. This is quite useful if an error in the last few phases (bad dvd, etc.) so that the user doesn't have to wait another couple of hours to get a result.
  • Add the ability to add a recording directly to mytharchive from the watch recording page.
  • Add an option to insert Chapter breaks at commercial flags from recordings. Or any method of inserting Chapters ;) [patch in ticket #3655? Seems to no longer work, crashes when mythburn is called]
  • Add the progress of MythArchive to the status page for Mythbackend so we can tell from a remote location when the archive process is finished.
  • Use Transmageddon/Arista profiles to define requirements for Palm Pre/iWhatever etc.
  • If the user has gone through and manually created cutpoints for the recording, these cutpoints could be used as chapters instead of some random period of time. Normally a cut-list will correspond to the commercial breaks, so it is a more logical place to separate it.
  • I have terrible problems with .ICEauthority and most people recommend this be renamed or deleted for each burn. Does this file have to be used by MythArchive?
  • 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.
  • Additional media size selections for 25GB and 50GB Blue-Ray archives. Long HD-quality programming doesn't fit on DVDs, even after transcoding. Obviously, such a selection wouldn't transparently work with Blu-Ray set-top boxes, only MythTV.
  • Support repackaging video into either AVI or mpeg4 container formats. Many current DVD set-top boxes support MPEG4, but they don't support the NUV files Mythtv generates.