[mythtv] Wondering about changing the MythTV player Play/Pause behaviour...

[Vaughan Harper]

On 07/12/2015 19:48, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 12/07/2015 02:18 PM, John P Poet wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 11:35 AM Vaughan Harper wrote:
>>
>>> Folks,
>>> In the UK, one of the major PVRs is Sky+ (comparable with Tivo in North
>>> America?). The play/pause behaviour is different from the MythTV player
>>> (with Sky+ if you are fast forwarding/scanning and you press Play then
>>> it goes into Play x1 rather than pausing), so I'd like to change the
>>> MythTV behaviour to match Sky+, in order to make it easier switching
>>> from one to another. (I'd also like to change the speed up/slow down
>>> behaviour to match Sky+ and try and emulate the Apple TV "what was 
>>> that"
>>> feature to replay the last 30 seconds with subtitles on.)
>>>
>>> So I'm wondering whether there would be there would be general interest
>>> in this or whether I should just do it as a personal fork. It seems 
>>> like
>>> the key changes would be in tv_play.cpp, but I guess that if it were to
>>> be adopted there would have to be a setting to control whether to stick
>>> with the existing behaviour or use this changed behaviour, so that 
>>> would
>>> require more changes to set/store this setting.
>>>
>>> What do people think? Shall I just do my own thing, or should I submit
>>> the work?
>> In Myth, the 'P' is mapped to PAUSE by default.  The PAUSE action 
>> toggles
>> between Play and Pause.  The is also a PLAY action (I have it mapped to
>> Ctrl+P), which always goes into the Play mode.  If you are talking about
>> FFWD/RWND, then hitting Ctrl+P may solve that problem for you.
>>
> ... (and lots more good info from job) ...
>> In summary, you may be able to get most of the way to your goal 
>> without any
>> code changes, but with some configuration.
>>
>
> And as far as the new behaviors (like the "what was that" you 
> mentioned), if you do code to provide the feature, it should be done 
> as a separate action, rather than changing the TV Playback/SEEKRWND 
> action.  You could make a TV Playback/REPLAYWITHSUBS.  Note, too, that 
> you'll have to deal with "everything else" if you try to implement 
> that--where "everything else" includes things like a) choosing the 
> right subtitle or caption stream (something that's easy if you're 
> making a DVR for Sky only, but hard when trying to work with TV all 
> around the world), b) handling cases where subtitles/captions are 
> already enabled (without changing the chosen subtitle/caption stream), 
> c) handle cases where the button is pressed multiple times (without 
> blindly toggling captions for each press), and d) if the subtitles are 
> supposed to go back off after, you'll need to handle the case where 
> subtitles were on before (and leave them on after), among other things.
>
> Note, too, that with LIRC, you can actually map multiple configs to a 
> single button, such that they are passed to the application in turn 
> (see http://www.lirc.org/html/configure.html#lircrc_format ). So, you 
> could actually change your ~/.lircrc such that you have something like:
>
>     begin
>         prog   = mythtv
>         button = KEY_REWIND
>         config = Left
>         config = T
>     end
>
>
> (where I'm assuming that Left is mapped to TV Playback/SEEKRWND and T 
> is mapped to TV Playback/TOGGLECC or TV Playback/TOGGLESUBTITLE or 
> whatever is appropriate in your case). You may also find it works more 
> smoothly/is better at picking up the subs if you send T first, then 
> Left.  This would give you something like (or exactly like?) your 
> "what was that feature".
>
> Of course, if you're using a the Linux kernel "remote controls are 
> nothing more than stupid keyboards" driver for your remote, you can't 
> do this.
>
> Mike
John, Mike,
Thanks very much for your comments - much appreciated - I'll have a 
think about what to do next...

Vaughan