[mythtv-users] External channel change not passing channel

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Mon Apr 2 17:56:11 UTC 2007


    > Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:02:06 -0400
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    > I think the page is organized appropriately.  The first page is the 
    > information that can/should be set /by the user/ (i.e. fields for the 
    > user's use).  The second page is "advanced" (don't touch this unless you 
    > know what you're doing) stuff that's for MythTV's use.

Hmm.  Really?  I'm quite surprised by this statement.  Just to be sure
we're not confused here---we're talking about the two (and only two)
pages of the Channel Editor in mythtv-setup, right?

In -my- (admittedly old) version of that, the only controls on the
second page are the FreqID, and finetune, contrast, brightness, color,
and hue.  I can certainly see how finetine might be dangerous (change
it and you might break your ability to tune that channel), but why in
the world do you say that contrast, brightness, color, and hue are
"advanced" and "know what you're doing" sorts of stuff?  They appear
to be -exactly- like the knobs on the front of an old-style TV, and
would be the obvious controls to twiddle if a user was unhappy with
the appearance of a particular channel.

The stuff on the -first- page, OTOH, is really where you can shoot
yourself in the foot, e.g., by fiddling with the XMLID, the video
source, the format, etc etc.  The second page's FreqID seems no more
dangerous than the majority on the stuff on the first page.

Can you explain why you say that the CBCH controls are so dangerous?
And, if so, should the page have some sort of "don't fiddle with
this!" warning on it somewhere?

[Now, if there are lots of other internal controls in the SVN version
of the second page of this, that's different, but it sounds like the
OP was looking at approximately the same page I am right now.]

    > There's /never/ a reason to change the value of "Channel or Frequency" 
    > if you're using a "standard" frequency table.

...except that you, yourself, told me to do exactly that in order to work
around a months-long Zap2It screwup in which they'd misassigned channels
and which they -still- haven't fixed:

http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2006-July/141556.html.

[That particular thread also includes my amazement that there -was- a
second page, and my confusion about why that one field seemed misplaced
compared to all the others---and for no good reason, since there was a
lot of space at the bottom of the page above the "Next" button and if
there -had- been something there, I would have been more likely to
notice that my window was being truncated at the bottom...]

Of course, the -real- question is, "what does an inexperienced user
think about the layout?" since any experienced user knows exactly
where everything is and how to find it and whether there's anything
missing.  This is why domain experts are not the best people to
evaluate whether information is being presented clearly to non-experts.


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