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
  • Make controllable from the front end control socket the same as other plugins. E.g JUMP Mythbrowser & PLAY <URL>
  • Option to change user agent string for sites only supporting a specific platform or browser (in firefox I use user agent overrider extension for viewing vod on maxdome)

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...
Same question as before. Folder.png only carries special meaning within the Video Library, so they should only exist in your video folders. The only time you would see them is if you had told MythGallery to look at your video folders. Why are you mixing your photographs and videos?

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

Important.png Note: MythMusic was nearly completely rewritten prior to the 0.25 release, so many of these requests may no longer be valid.

  • 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 CDDB lookup matches multiple discs, allow selection of other metadata sets.
  • 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.)

MythMessage

  • 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.

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. Even better: The links should be user-editable via Mythweb-settings. (You can hand-edit the template, e.g. /var/www/html/mythweb/modules/tv/tmpl/default/detail.php, starting around line 490, but every next MythTV update breakes it again.)
  • In "Recorded Programmes", add ability to toggle "watched" on a recording (we can already toggle "auto expire"; toggling "watched" would be useful for people who spend periods away from home, and watch TV while they're away).
  • 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.
  • Would be nice to have feature to bulk delete recordings in MythWeb - e.g. tickbox next to each recording on the Recorded Programs page, with a button to delete all selected recordings.

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.