[mythtv] Introduction LONG (was Re: Interesting Comparison)

Martin Møller martin at martinm-76.dk
Sun Mar 5 11:48:25 UTC 2006


Just a thought about a possible implementation that shouldn't load the machine 
too much. I can't really help with implementing it though :-/

For each channel you have a set to videos. That much is established.
You want it to work pretty much like LiveTV. Okay.
Given that, a short delay on 'changing channels' should be acceptible.

This is what I though when I first read the start of the thread:

When you have set up the channels and possibly randomized the set of movies to 
play in each one, why not simply query the 'active' movie in each 'channel' 
for it's length and then just count upwards until the file is done, not 
actually playing that file unless someone has 'tuned' to the channel?

You could then look at the next movie in the queue maybe 30 seconds before the 
current one ends and have the starting point in that movie ready when the one 
before finishes. That way, if no one is watching, all you would have running 
extra would be, say, 4-10 counters in some semi-backend process. That 
shouldn't load the machine much and all movies should be easy to query for 
their actual lengths.

Of course it gets a bit tricky it you should also be able to go back to the 
beginning of a movie currently playing, but it would probably be easier to 
call up it's information and have some option to launch it from the beginning 
which you when pretty much simply run mythtv on that movie and exit the 
channel.

Just a thought.

/Martin.

Søndag 05 marts 2006 10:26 skrev Anthony Benjamin:
> First off, sorry that this reply is probably not going to thread correctly,
> but I usually read the lists out of the archives, and decided to join, in
> part, so I could reply to this thread.
>
> I think that the 'custom channel' idea is very, very good. I find that I
> share much of the same viewing habits as the OP, and I would love if a
> channel that was in the EPG was just randomly selected videos out of my
> collection. I started looking at the MythTV codebase to see how something
> like this could be done. I think what you would want to do is create a new
> recording source and establish channels on that new recording source. The
> channels themselves could have definitions like, all mythvideos that fit
> into *simpsons*. This would allow for very fine grained control over what
> was shown on the channel. Then maybe modify mythfilldatabase so that when
> the EPG is populated with your regular broadcast information, movies
> fitting the guidelines for the channels you established were also
> populated... looking at the codebase, I quickly became lost on where I
> would have to add some of this functionality.
>
> I'd appreciate hearing more thoughts on how we could accomplish this
> feature... or towards where in the code I should look. Thanks :-)


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