[mythtv] ivtv settings patch

[Geoffrey Hausheer]

On Fri, 05 Sep 2003 19:20:16 +0200, "Chris B news-at-semperpax.com
|mythtv/1.0-Allow|" <d14ahk4yan0t at sneakemail.com> said:
> What about:
> 
> - Leave the Profile setup screen as it is
> - Remove all hard-coded profile name in the code ("Default", "Live TV", 
> "Transcode")
> - Add 2 db fields to the "capturecard" table ("LowRecProfile" - 
> "HighRecProfile") pointing to arbitrary profiles
Sure this is a possibility.

> - Add a new setup screen as to associate the high/low fields to profiles 
> per capture card and to specify the "default" transcode profile (that 
> leaves an open path to allow specifying the transcode profile at will, 
> even though I agree that will probably be hard work. Anyway, I think 
> there should be more ways to schedule a transcode than the "X". I'm 
> testing now a simple patch for mythweb)
Dealing with the transcoder is tricky.  1st, there is little reason to
schedule a transcode if you haven't done the commercial cut (in which
case, use 'X'), or when you want to save space by doing RTJpeg to MPEG4
(use AutoTranscode).  I don't really see the use for control from
mythweb.
The other issue with the transcoder, is that the profile used to record
isn't stored in the recording.  Thus enabling/disabling the Autotranscode
can be done per profile (or perhaps better would be per card, since it
would be confusing to allow you to enable the transcoder for a LiveTV
profile).  however, it is not obvious how to control the Transcode
profile, since when using 'X' you don't necessarily know which of the
profiles to transcode too.  i haven't worked out a solution to this yet,
but for now, a single transcode profile for all cards is acceptable
(because there is no reason to transcode to RTJpeg, and you can't
transcode to MPEG2).  If it ever becomes possible to edit out the
commercials from an MPEG2 stream without converting to MPEG4, this will
require more thought.


> - Assume low profile for live TV and high profile for recordings (it 
> could be possible to add a shortcut to switch profiles in the middle of 
> a live session)
I think this is overly complex, but that's just me.  i certainly don't
think it is high-priority

> - Selecting a specific profile while scheduling a recording could also 
> then indirectly allow to specify which card to use (I find it quite 
> important to be able to choose which program will be recorded with my 
> crappy bttv and which one with the PVR, even if the least interesting 
> program comes first)
Sure this would be possible.

> 
> I don't know yet how the master/slave system work so I don't know if 
> everything is applicable.
It all makes sense, but it is quite a bit more effort than what I was
actually plnning on implementing.  I'm also not sure it is very intuitive
for a user. If you have a 'MJPEG' profile, you can't attach it to a bttv
or pvr card (same for all others), so to me it seems backwards to have a
pool of profiles associated with random cards.  Instead, I think the user
should select the card, and then create profiles for it (then myth can be
smart enough not to offer him profile-types that aren't compatible with
the card).  This is effectively what my method would allow (though I want
to start simple (create per-card hard-coded Default/LiveTV profiles), it
is fully extensible to an arbitraty number of profiles per card, and the
ability to select from them at will when scheduling a program..whenever
someone gets around to coding that).  I do like the idea of adding the
default profiles to the capturecard table, so that it is easy to change
these whenever someone puts together a screen to allow that in the
future.

.Geoff