[mythtv] MythVideo feature

m m dragonflight at rogers.com
Thu Nov 18 04:38:15 UTC 2010


I have not, as of yet, contributed any code to MythTV, but have tinkered with the code for the last 5 years. I would like to suggest the following feature (the first of perhaps many) that I might be able to contribute.

The feature introduces a new kind of folder/item hybrid for MythVideo, best explained with an example.
DVDs often consist of sets of two (or more) disks that offer a variety of formats/versions/extra features. Most of the time I am only interested in the movie, but occasionally I like to look at the special features. From a user perspective it looks like a folder with sub-items DVD, extras or DVD1, DVD2... AND it looks like a playable item with a unique play command and full metadata. In my case the play command uses xine to play the specific title I usually watch. If I want to play the extras disk I go into the folder and play it. (I presume it would be wise to look at a way for the internal player to play a specific title)

In other "browse by" modes only this new item appears in the list and not its children (though they are accessible by entering into the folder).

I also use this feature with TV Series, so for example if browsing by cast I see a single line item Star Trek TOS beside William Shatner instead of all the individual episodes (of course one might ask the question why would you want to look up Shatner!).

I have been using this feature since release 0.21, but never really took care of the details, only worrying about what I specifically needed. I generally only use the tree view, but have been looking around the other views to make sure it works with them and am willing to make sure it works "correctly".

There are two parts to this. The first is the display stuff and the second is a way of adding to the database. At the moment I use an external program to generate my metadata (a variant of find_meta).

The nice part of the implementation is that unless the extra entries in videmetadata are generated there is no difference to the user.

As part of this I would also like to change the way flat mode works in the various "browse by" modes. It seems to me that the flat mode is not really very useful especially when looking at cast, director etc. I would like to suggest that flat mode be how it looks today (i.e. 2 levels) and with flat mode disabled it looks like file trees rooted at each "browse by node".

I have an implementation (mostly) for 0.23 and will of course implement it in the current version.

Step two will be a discussion on how one might reasonably create the necessary metadata for this feature.

mike
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