Feature Wishlist (Frontend Addons)

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This articles represents a subsection of the Feature Wishlist.

General

  • fixated image outputfilter corresponding to the RADIO-Feature an outputfilter could be useful that takes an image file and displays it instead the videostream, this way the audioonly channels could be made to display the "logo" of that channel additionally providing a simple solution for the radiochannel problem --Sususu 14:03, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Descriptive Audio Provide an option to choose the descriptive audio track over the standard audio selection order. Alternatively, remember the previous setting automatically rather than requiring the user to dig through the settings menu. For some markets, this will require support for multiple simultaneous audio playback, as the descriptions are carried independently from the normal audio, rather than mixed together.
  • All Frontend-Events (up/down/enter/selected item) sent to an External Program (this way full lcd/led control or myth->remote communication or talking mythtv could be made)
  • Frontend idle close. It would be great if there was a feature to allow the frontend to close after a period of inactivity, i.e. it has just sat there doing nothing, so it could be assumed the box is doing nothing from a frontend perspective susequently the frontend can be shutdown allowing mythwelcome to then shut the box down if it can. This is not a sleep timer fuction, but would need to be configurable in the front end settings, some could find it annoying i am sure - after x amount of minutes with nothing happening shut the frontend down. This would make a really good feature i am sure, and would add to the wife friendliness of the system and save some energy.
simple alternative "xautolock -time 10 -locker killall mythfrontend.real" --Sususu 12:34, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
gotta say i use "xautolock -time 10 -locker sh shellscript.sh" and that in case your tv supports it properly dpms can be used to switch TV off while the system is still recording but none's watching. --Sususu 14:38, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
Note that mythfrontend.real only exists on MythBuntu.
When you connect to the backend through mythprotocol, you can specify 'Monitor' or 'Playback'. Monitor allows the backend to shut down, while Playback does not. Rather than terminate the frontend when idle, dropping back to MythWelcome, the better option would be to simply flip to the other mode, removing the shutdown block. There may be other considerations involved, such as implementing reconnection and WOL methods for remote frontends.
  • Possibility to use different on screen keyboard layout then the selected language for entire Myth-TV. When people like to use English as global language for their entire system but wants their local keyboard layout. --Floppe 12 April 2010
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
Storage of season/episode information in the subtitle is a messy solution prone to failure, and will not be supported.
  • Key to switch between windowed and full screen mode
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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
    • Or alternatively, simply promote any items in the watch list with a book mark to the top of the watch list.
  • 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 transcoder profile setup.
  • Allow new transcoder profiles to be created.
  • 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.
  • Create a re-usable custom Schedule rule (eg a Prime-Time Rule 7pm-10pm) so I can have this option on any recording eg Record "ABC New" using 'Prime-time' rule.
  • 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.
  • Add the option to "autohide" the mouse after it doesn't move a configurable number of seconds, or 5, if thats easier :) --bflong
  • 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?
  • 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 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.
  • Optional input method on textedit object, using T9 [2] and a prediction text input on multiple languages.
  • 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.
Can be done with power rules, or adjusting the duplicate rules, or filtering for new episodes, or complaining to listings providers to provide better data.
  • 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.
Planned behavior, to allow for detachable frontends to be taken on trips.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Provided by Setbookmark
  • Put the name of the day in the top-left corner of the EPG -- often the day is more important than the date.
Controllable by the theme
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Keep statistics of "Time Saved" - Keep individual stats on ammount of time saved using time stretch, as well as time saved using commercial skipping and the sum of the two in order to tell the user how much total time of TV they've watched and how much total time they've saved using time stretch and commercial skipping.
  • MythTouchMote A new frontend where the user interface split from the playback device onto a remote tablet (UMPCs, netbooks, iPhone, Nokia-n800i, Android phones) a user interface specification for this has been created and a bounty is negotiable.
  • Action sound, a short confirmation 'blip' to say that a keypress was received and is 'being processed'
This is difficult to achieve without implementing and requring all audio devices to be routed through an ALSA mixer (which has its own issues at the moment) --- As a work around, look on the backend setup screen. There is a config option for "Execute command when key pressed" (or something like thing) that you can configure to play a sound
  • Jump point to quit the application. This will allow a single remote command to quit from anywhere, particularly useful for a frontend/backend machine running mythwelcome which is set to turn itself off when idle.
You can run `irexec` with the command `killall mythfrontend`. (or `killall mythfrontend.real` on ubuntu)
You can run `irxevent` to send the keystroke 'Alt-F4'.
  • Expire LiveTV not before MaxAge an option to keep LiveTv until MaxAge Exceeds and even expire recordings before LiveTv --Sususu 15:10, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Mark for replacement - Ability to mark an episode to be rerecorded in the future (via any existing rules) without deleting it. Useful for over-the-air programs with minor interference, or if program start is cut off (e.g. sporting event went a bit long), or to replace old recordings after upgrading hardware or TV signal. --paulsid
  • Onscreen display when LiveTV is behind - Display a little icon or animate on the screen to show that LiveTV is behind. Sky and other set-top boxes has a visual indicator on the device for this.
  • Templates for LCD display - LiveTV, recordings and videos have limited info on the LCD's. I understand that they have limited space, but there is bigger once now, hence the template support. Personally, I would like to see signal on the LCD, perhaps 5.1 support for imon (full support for http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Imon - LCD). In a four line LCD you could display" %CHANNEL_NAME% br %SHOW_NAME% br Signal : %SIGNAL% br %TIME_START%%SHOW_PROGRESS%%TIME_END%. This will show something like:
   TV ONE
SOME TV SHOW
13:00 ==-    14:00
Signal : 78db

Multi-User Support

  • 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?
  • 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.

Decoding Hardware

  • 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

Menu Mode

  • 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.
  • 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.
If you are using an external player, your external player can manage this on its own. If it doesn't, you can replace said external player with a script wrapper around said external player.
  • Add Suspend Menu Option to frontend exit menu options.
The shutdown option is configurable. Configure the shutdown option to suspend instead.

LiveTV / View Recording

  • Ability to set a different auto-expire timing for shorter recordings. Ex. Something like "Immediately delete livetv shows shorter than xx minutes" or "Auto expire shorter than xx minutes after xx days". The problem comes up when zapping trough livetv channels and all pieces of recorded shows are maintained until they auto-expires (ex. 7 days), making difficult to find the right livetv show to re-watch
LiveTV recordings a couple minutes long or less are automatically deleted a short period of time.
All other LiveTV recordings will be deleted after a time specified in the general recording sessions, defaulting to one day, or shorter if storage space is needed.
If a LiveTV recording is to be retained, that can be marked as such by pressing record (r) while viewing, or through the menus in the management pages.
  • Ability to define a default maximum daily use of livetv/recordings , which can be overruled by password. This is a common type of parental control seen in other consumer appliances, encouraging children to manage time.
  • 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.
See Boblight for an external solution.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • #488 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".
Might be do-able with the video widget when the new OSD code gets finished. Understand that such playback would require large amounts of CPU power.
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
I don't understand the purpose of this. If the TV overscans such that MythTV needs to correct for it, you've already lost 1:1 mapping.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Ability to fine tune a channel's frequency while watching TV.
  • 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.
  • It would be nice to have a "Grouped Display" in the "Watch Recordings" section. That means currently you have to select the displayed group through a seperate menu, but it would be nice if you could navigate through the groups like in the MythVideo section. e.g.
All Recordings - 
Series - Stargate SG1 - Series 1
                        Series 2...
         Columbo - Series 1 ...
Movies - Movie 1 - ...
  • Ability to rename existing recordings. As an example, one might record PBS's "Nova" each week and wind up with a dozen recordings entitled "NOVA", but otherwise distinguished only by date. The nice-to-have would be the the ability for the user to name them things like "Mt McKinlley (nova)", "Sea Mammal Rescue (nova)".... and whatever else.
This sounds more like a deficiency in listings data rather than anything MythTV has control over.
Not necessarily. It's asking a lot of the listings service to know that my daughter's ballet school was used as a setting for one episode of a TV show. (Yes, this is a real example.)
  • Allow recordings to be booked from trailers in live TV and recordings. This can now be done on DTT in the UK by using the related content table components of services (service component carrying RCT identified by descriptor 0x74 in component in PMT, component carries private sections with table_id=0x76). See ETSI TS 102 323 for more details of the related content table.
  • "Multiple Simultaneous Video Playback" (similar to DirecTV's Mix Channels) - Implement a Picture-in-Picture-like feature for watching multiple recordings and/or live shows simultaneously. The scenario where this might best fit would be on "game day" when multiple games are on - or after you've recorded several games. If you have 4 tuners, you might be able to record 4 games simultaneously. You would then display all n# of games in boxes on the screen. Displaying all 4 games at the same time would allow you to watch the action across the league, or even multiple sports (i.e., football and racing on Sunday). Highlighting one of the video boxes being played would play the audio from that stream. Select a particular game if you wanted to watch it full screen. DirecTV has a similiar feature for several of their sports packages - an example of one of their "mix channels" and more details are here: http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/sports/soccer, http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/directv/technology, http://www.directv.com/see/landing/mixchannels_FAQ.html. DirecTV does this for Sports, News, and Kids shows.
  • Swap recordings without PIP. For systems capable of playing one HD stream, but not two, a swap recordings button that allowed the user to, for example, switch between two live sporting events that they are recording. ie. a video-muted PIP that allowes the user to swap what they are watching.
  • At the moment it is very hard to scroll to a recording beginning with a letter in the middle of the alphabet as I have to scroll through all recordings. It would be great if one could add the possibility to first select a character e.g. "M" and then get only a listing of all recordings beginning with "M". Mockup: http://www.finswimmer.de/gentoo/mockup_mythtv.png
  • Be able to set the order of channels in a channelgroup
  • When browsing Recordings and cursor is on a Display Group ("Live TV" or "Mythbusters" ), pressing Delete will ask "Delete all Recordings in this Group?"
Not quite what you're asking for, but with a couple extra keypresses, you can add that group to the playlist, and then delete the contents of that playlist.
  • When skipping forward/backward (i.e. 30 seconds) and it crosses beginning/end of a commercial detection point, it should resume playback at that point. This avoids over-skipping. Yes, there is a skip function that will hit those points, but commercial detection is not always super accurate and many times the 30 second skip is used instead (or in conjunction). The reason I mention this feature is because it exists in commercial purchased DVR's (Replay, Tivo, etc).

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.
Support for multiple embedded subtitles are supported
  • 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
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