[mythtv] Some ideas about mythmusic

Jonathan Fors etnoy at broach.se
Wed Aug 17 22:01:20 UTC 2005


Hello.

Today I tried out mythmusic for the first time, and I just felt for
writing here and just tell of my spontaneous ideas for improvements.
I'll probably look into implementing these improvements, but first I
wanted to get some feedback for them. It would be great to get some
feedback about this.

1. Filesystem-based browsing
Currently Mythmusic sorts all the music after artists derived from the
internal tags. This could be great to some people, but it is not the way
my music is sorted. I have about 150 GiB of music on a central server
mounted via smb, and I have a very good system of sorting so I can
browse the music by descending into real folders and playing from there.
If you have used the mpd music player system with the ncmpc client,
you'll probably understand what I mean. 
Of course, this method of browsing would be an option, and not replace
the current setting since I believe a lot of people uses this.

2. Separated browsing and playlist maintenace
Same here again, this idea comes from my long-time usage of ncmpc. It
has in my opinion a superior playlist managment, and it is different
from the one of mythmusic (and i.e. rhythmbox). One screen is used to
browse the music by going into the folders (see #1) and add music to a
playlist. This can be done either by adding whole directory structures
or individual songs. The playlist is in another screen which shows the
currently added songs in the playlist. 
This has one great advantage, which me and my sister always use with
ncmpc: the ability to browse and discover new songs/artists/albums etc.
without interrupting the playing music. Perhaps this is possible
already, have I missed anything?

Here follows a few ideas and criticism of mythgallery, so bare with me
=)

3. Local thumbnail caching
Like the situation with the music, I am using a central fileserver for
all our family's photos. I don't want mythtv do touch _anything_ on
these images, so the permissions are set to read-only on the smb share.
Now, for the thumbnail generation speed to be sane I really need
thumbnail caching, but this won't work since the thumbnails are stored
in the same folder as the images it thumbnails. I really don't want
these "garbage" files hanging aroud on the central fileserver (Thumbs.db
anyone?) so a thumbnail cache stored in ~/.mythtv would be much better.
The program gqview caches thumbnails this way. The problem is bigger
than might first be expected, since if I have to generate thumbs all the
time as I am viewing images, the image showing process will be much,
much slower. Right now the speed is extremely low, and it is "broken" in
some people's eyes here at home =)

4. Thumbnail re-indexing
To develop further on the above idea, it would be great to be able to
run a large thumb re-indexing as a cronjob or manually from myth. This
process would, just lite mythmusic (and the mpd music server), go
through the whole image tree and generate thumbnails as described in #3.
It would also delete stale caches, so that if a directory is removed
from the server, a stale thumb cache won't have to take up space.

5. Hidden menu
Currently the actions menu is always visible when browsing galleries.
Isn't it better to have it hidden and show it when the menu button is
pressed?

6. Read-only mode
A really random idea I just got, have an option in the mythgallery setup
dialog to make mythgallery hide all image transformation settings, ideal
for read-only image setups like mine. 

Now that's quite a list. I hope that you all have something to say about
these ideas.

Regards,
Jonathan



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