[mythtv] Regression in Previously Recorded

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/14/2017 03:08 PM, David Engel wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 02:12:50PM -0500, Peter Bennett wrote:
>> Somebody had said the most common actions need to be on Enter/Select and the
>> others on M(menu).
> That was me who said that.  I don't know if it's officially
> docuemented anywhere, but here's the guidelines I try to follow.
> Pressing SELECT should bring up a menu with the most common actions
> (limited to about 3 to 5) relevent to the currently highlighted
> "thing" (*).  Pressing MENU should bring up a menu with additional,
> less common actions and other actions that affect other things about
> the screen (like sorting, etc.) (**).  Pressing other keys like INFO,
> PLAY, EDIT and DELETE should act as shortcuts to choosing one of the
> options on either of the menus.

Yeah, originally MENU was meant to bring up a menu that listed actions 
that apply to the screen or the section of MythTV currently in use (and 
may include actions that apply to the currently-selected item), and 
SELECT was meant to bring up the "shortcut" or "context" menu for 
actions that apply to the currently-selected individual item.  Generally 
MENU brought up a more-complete menu and SELECT brought up the 
most-commonly used or most-likely-to-be-desired actions.

> (*) Note that there are exceptions to this.  One very notable one is
> the Watch Recordings screen where pressing SELECT starts playing.
> Personally, I'd like to fix that and do away with the whole,
> unintuitive, "double menu" thing on that screen.

And this exception is where it was changed when users complained that 
"Any sane user interface doesn't need 2 different buttons for menus."  
I'm not sure if the people who complained were using the Apple 5-button 
remote and really couldn't spare a button or if they just hadn't 
recognized the reason.  So, the 2 menus--the context menu (SELECT menu) 
and the main menu (MENU menu) were combined into one that flip-flops 
when you hit MENU again.  It's also even more annoying that which one 
displays initially differs depending on which column your selection is 
in when you hit MENU, so it makes it really awkward to explain how to do 
something in that screen ("Hit the MENU key, once or twice, until you 
see 'Playlist Options,' and then select 'Playlist Options'..." instead 
of just saying, "Hit the MENU key, then select Playlist Options, 
then..." or "Hit MENU|Playlist Options...").

> (**) It's also been suggested that we should have something like
> ITEMMENU and SCREENMENU actions for each screen.

Which, funny enough is what SELECT and MENU were, respectively. :) And 
now that it was changed in Watch Recordings, but not elsewhere (such as 
Watch Videos), usability of MythTV is even worse than it was before--I'm 
constantly pressing the wrong button because I watch things about 
equally in recordings and videos, and they're different, so I can't 
train my brain/fingers to do the right thing since the approach for the 
same action is different in the 2 places.

Mike