[mythtv-users] a couple of nits and a big transcoding (MPEG4->MPEG4) problem

[Bruce Markey]

Steve Briggs wrote:
> I've been using myth for a couple of months now and overall
> have been quite impressed with it's features and capabilities.
> 
> I'm running Fedora Core 4 and myth 0.18.1-116 from atrpms.
> 
> Two minor nits and one big one problem:
> 
> 1) I save a lot of movies.  The "Watch Recordings" layout
> works great for TV shows (with the series titles on the right
> and the individual episodes on the left), not so good for
> movies.  All the movies show up on the right with no
> hierarchical structure -- which makes for a painfully
> long list to scroll through.  I've figured out how
> to go change the database to make the title some category
> (i.e. "Movies-SF") and the subtitle = movie title, so
> it's not a big deal, but it would be nice if the GUI
> supported this somehow.  Could be I'm missing something
> obvious here.

Yep. TV Settings->playback->View Recordings (Recording Groups)
"Default View:". And, in the recording rule options pages Storage
Options 'Store in the "<whatever>" recording group'.

> 2) Inside the individual episodes.  The GUI seems to list
> them from most recent recording to oldest.  It would be
> nice to have a configurable parameter to change this.
> Particularly for movies, when I'm looking for a movie, I
> remember the title, not when I recorded it.  I'd like to
> see the movies listed alphabetically.  For series, probably
> the most useful would be to sort by episode number or
> original air date.  Again, maybe I'm just missing something.

But the left column you are complaining about in 1) is sorted
alphabetically.

That said, I've always believed that the list should be controlled
in two separate dimensions; grouping and sort order. Whenever I
mention this, other developers scoff.

Take for example the Program Lister (upcoming episodes, search
results, etc.). From the Search Lists->New Titles list you can
press Home and End to cycle through views All, Premieres, Movies
and Series. The key "1" sorts by time forward or reverse and "2"
alphabetically by title forward or reverse. So from this page
I can look at Series by time to see what's coming up first or
Movie alphabetically by title from this same page.

I'm not saying the playbackbox should be exactly the same, the
needs of the playback list are different. However, lots of
windowed applications that present a list have one way to select
what should be included in the list and another to select how
that list should be sorted. This is true of the mail reader that
I am using right now and the list of cars in the Gran Turismo
game I was just playing.

For the playbackbox, the left column just uses up screen space
to express one of several ways the playback box expresses grouping.
Personally, if I want to see the episodes of a series, I'd rather
have a single list sorted by title and episode. This way I could
simply scroll up and down to find the episodes of series' grouped
together in this one list rather than Left, scroll to find the title,
Right, Left, scroll to find the next title, Right, etc.

But back to your question, set your Default View and use Recording
Groups for now.

--  bjm