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

[Joseph A. Caputo]

-----Original Message-----
>From: mythtv-users-bounces at snowman.net
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at snowman.net]On Behalf Of >Zachary S. Bedell
>Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 12:47 AM
>To: mythtv-users at snowman.net
>Subject: [mythtv-users] FW: Questions about MythMusic & MythVideo Future
Development
>
>
>Alright...  First of all, I feel like a real louse for writing this. [snip]

And also for sending HTML-encoded mail to the list....


>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.
>

[snip]

>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.

The buttons are not mouse-clickable (do you see a mouse pointer on your
screen?), they are keyboard-navigable.  The L-R arrows move around the
buttons, Enter/Space clicks.  There is a setting option (General Settings ->
"Use Keyboard/Remote Accelerated Buttons") that changes this behavior to
enable direct keybindings for the buttons; unlike the old MythMusic the
buttons are still displayed in this mode (with the accelerator key listed),
but they are there only for visual reference.

[snip]

>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.

The MythMusic playback screen is completely themeable... you can tweak the
fonts, font sizes, colors, positions and sizes of any of the containers via
the music-ui.xml file.  You can turn off some of the objects/containers by
changing its draworder to "-1" in the theme file, or by giving it a position
outside of its container or off-screen.  I'm currently looking into creating
a patch that will allow you to simply leave an element out of the
music-ui.xml theme file, thereby causing it not to be created at all.
Currently I think this would cause a crash...


>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.

Already done... the "List Videos" menu choice allows you to browse your
video directory structure.


-JAC