[mythtv-users] Mythtv .19 live watching

[Osma Ahvenlampi]

I wrote, a week ago:
> > d) display live tv, but show a message over the OSD that storage space
> > is not available, so time-shift capability and recording are disabled.

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 12:50 -0400, Isaac Richards wrote:
> Which would happen every single time the user entered live-tv.  Nor is it 
> exactly optimal for remote frontends.  Why would you want to put up with the 
> extra latency and delay of compressing video for transfer when you're not 
> saving it to a file?  Then I'd get bitching about how slow it was to change 
> channels _and_ "why won't it let me pause?" and "I was watching a movie I 
> didn't know I'd like, but the ending was so good and it wouldn't let me keep 
> it!"

Now this resembles a good justification, thanks Isaac :) "that would
mean pause wasn't available" is much better than "that's the way it was
made to work and changing it would be not according to PVR ideals".

It still isn't completely true for all of us - for instance, I only have
DVB tuners, so video is compressed and changing channels is slow to
begin with. I'd also argue that some compression of the video would be
desirable for remote frontends even if reception wasn't digital
originally.

The pause argument is good, though. I'd still argue that keeping a small
(let's say, half an hour to an hour) ringbuffer space available for the
purposes of pause and preparing for the user to decide to record
after-the-fact was easier to document and justify to end users than the
exact current method. There's not a whole lot of technical difference,
but sometimes little things count. 0.18's behaviour was easier to
understand in this respect, even if technically inferior in
implementation to the current method.

Another point I'd like to mention is that for a PVR, it would make more
sense to talk about storage space in terms of minutes of content as
opposed to mega- or gigabytes. Yes, it's a flexible concept because
compression rates change, but still, that's what we care about - how
many hours does the system fit? The 0.19 status screen has it right -
how many hours is there space remaining given average and maximum
bitrates. The same should just apply to all settings as well.

But enough about this subject, at least from me.

-- 
Osma Ahvenlampi   <oa at iki.fi>    http://www.fishpool.org