[mythtv-users] Ideas for new MythTV Features

Joseph A. Caputo jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Thu Dec 2 16:07:01 UTC 2004


On Thursday 02 December 2004 10:05, Randy Winchester wrote:
>
> The first idea is about making MythNews more useful.  MythNews is a
> great idea, but a lot of the content doesn't look that great rendered
> in fonts too small to see on a television.  MythNews already grabs
> the headlines for each of the items and displays them nicely.  Why
> not have MythNews grab the rest of the article text as well?   The
> display could use OSD routines to make it possible to read news and
> watch tv / recordings at the same time, sort of like the news ticker
> on CNN (although it might be preferable to scroll through a line or
> two at a time, like CC).  

This is problematic in 2 respects... first, we really have no good way 
of parsing the article to determine what is the actual news article 
text and what is extraneous information (ads, other links, etc).  All 
MythNews gets is a URL for the article; it could be any site and they 
all have different formats, making this approach a rather futile 
endeavor.

> If this is doable, then a next step might 
> be to better integrate MythWeb, similar to the WebTV "enhanced
> television" browser that can extract URLs imbedded in the VBI.

This is probably a better direction... right now MythNews actually uses 
the same engine as MythWeb, which is built around the KHTML/Konqueror 
rendering engine.  What is probably needed is a better embedded HTML 
rendering engine geared toward embedded devices or other 
non-traditional displays.  While this would be a really nice feature, I 
see it as being a bit far outside of Myth's core focus, so don't expect 
to see much development in this area real soon, unless someone decides 
to take long-term ownership of such a project.

>
> Another idea is for a playback scheduling module.  This is sort of
> the reverse of a recording schedule.  It would set up a playlist that
> could begin at a specified time and switch various MythTV functions
> as requested, such as a sequence of recordings, videos, pictures and
> music that would then play back unattended.

Now this is going in the right direction... it's been suggested before 
that Myth should treat different types of media a bit more 
homogeneously.  I'd like to see a more universal view of my media and 
be able to mix 'n' match different media types in playlists and such.  
I'd put this in the category of 
"it-will-happen-eventually-but-it-might-be-a-while-as-there-are-more-pressing-issues-at-the-moment"

> One more idea . . . the OSD and menu text is nice, so why not make it
> available as a character generator / titler while editing recordings?
> That would be very cool!  And if that can be done, the routines could
> be reused in the playback scheduler as well.

Again, I think this is stepping too far outside Myth's core focus 
(though others may disagree).  Myth's editing function is meant only 
for basic cutting; what you're proposing would be more like authoring, 
which is best left to a separate program on a dedicated PC with a 
keyboard and mouse.

Just my $0.02.

-JAC


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