[mythtv-users] FW: Questions about MythMusic & MythVideo Future Development

[Zachary S. Bedell]

Alright...  First of all, I feel like a real louse for writing this.  I
haven't contributed a single blessed line of code to Myth, and here I am
complaining.  Momma always told me what happens to choosy beggars, but....
 
I'm wondering about future plans for MythMusic and MythVideo.  The recent UI
revamps on both programs no doubt took a ton of work on the part of their
respective developers, but I feel that (for me at least) they've actually
reduced the functionality of both programs.
 
First, a word about my setup: P3-550 w/ an NVidia TV out card running at
640x480, SB-Live, LIRC remote, and a ton of storage.  It's all plugged into
an RCA 27" TV and home theater package.  The TV's decent, but not HiDef or
anything terribly fancy.  I don't use the PVR functions of MythTV at all
simply because I haven't got the hardware (or presently the cash to throw at
hardware) to make it work acceptably.  Also, I've got a DirecTivo sitting on
the shelf right next to my Myth box, and until I figure out how to do pure
digital stream extraction from a standard DTV receiver, there'd be a quality
loss to go from the analog out on a standard IRD back into Myth digital.
 
But enough about me....
 
About MythMusic:
 
In order for any part of Myth to be useful for me, it's interface needs to
be fairly big. The new interface on MythMusic has a lot of fairly small
text.  It also has all the (I presume) mouse clickable buttons on the bottom
of the screen. I only use the LIRC remote to control Myth, so those buttons
are kind of superfluous. The previous M.Music interface could turn off
display of its buttons which was very useful and allowed for a bit more
screen real estate for the song list.  The old interface also accepted key
commands for fast forward / rewind that were the same as MythTV which made
it very easy to do everything by remote.  Finally, the Goom visualization
crashes immediately since about 6/14/03 CVS.  In the "old" M.Music, I'd had
problems with Goom, but I fixed it by changing the SDL and Goom resolutions
in mythgoom.c to 320x240 -- perfect for TV out.  In this version I tried
changing the hard coded 640x480 to 320x240, but it hasn't helped any.  I'm
not sure how I can provide more useful debugging info than that, but I'd be
happy to provide what I can if someone can tell me how.
 
On the bright side, I do very much like the new integrated playlist / song
display.  I just wish that I could turn off some of the other screen-eating
graphical bits below the listing & use a much larger font to display
everything.
 
 
As for MythVideo:
 
The new video browsing & IMDB look-ups are nifty for the few Hollywood
titles that I have kicking around, but most of my video collection is
non-blockbuster stuff -- TV episodes, Anime, and whatnot.  There's also a
HUGE number of titles.  I have everything sorted up into a fairly elaborate
directory tree, and the old tree-browsing interface was perfect for drilling
down to my various videos.  I made the mistake once of letting the new
M.Video run against my full video tree, and it took forever to index the
40,000-odd titles I had sitting there.  Then browsing by flipping through
one video at a time was impossible!  Are there any plans to re-integrate the
old browsing method into the new M.Video as an additional option?  Even if
the old code was just translated to run on the new Myth plug-in
architecture, I'd be more than happy to have both the old and new programs
in my Myth main menu.
 
 
 
Yet again, I want to say how sorry I am to be writing this multi-page
complaint about code I haven't even contributed to.  I know the folks
working on all of the Myth system are putting tons of work into this &
getting nothing for it in return.  I really want to stress how thankful I am
for all the hard work.
 
Up until this point, I've just kept my mouth shut (if you haven't got
anything nice to say...) waiting to see where things would go, rather than
stoop to posting a complaint.  Unfortunately, the recent changes to the Myth
library broke the old versions of MythMusic and MythVideo that I'd been
hanging on to.  Now that I have to use the newer versions of those programs,
I'm finding it really difficult to do any of the things I'd come to love
doing with Myth.
 
For now, I'm just going to revert everything back to the CVS code from
before the Video & Music changes.  Unfortunately with the new plug-in stuff
going on, I think that means I have to revert EVERYTHING and stay with old
code for the weather, gallery, and game plug-ins as well.
 
 
So to the developers:  What kind of stuff is in the works?  Are there plans
to integrate any of the best features from the old code into the newer
interfaces?  Thanks in advance, either way.
 
 
Hopefully,
Zac Bedell
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