[mythtv-users] how to improve Myth (was "OT: I'm streaming Netflix on my Linux box")

[Magnus]

Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> They've already cornered themselves in their respective rooms and are  
> redesigning the entire foundation the UI is built on. 

This is very good to hear. 

If I may suggest something for consideration and discussion, though, I
think there are some back-end considerations to keep in mind as well.

Right now, every media type that Myth deals with is handled in vastly
different ways.  If I record a TV show through a tuner, I watch it
through one facility.  If I download an episode via BitTorrent, it's
lumped in with all of the other videos not capture directly by Myth's
tuners.

Music is handled somewhere else.

Optical media is handled in a different way.

Then there's photographs...

See where I'm going?

IMHO, every media object known to MythTV should be cataloged and
accessed through one simple interface, using canned and custom queries
to filter down what the viewer wants to see/hear.

If I'm Mr. Star Trek Ubergeek and have every episode of every Star Trek
series ripped from DVD into Myth, why should they be viewed any
differently than the latest Stargate Atlantis captured by a tuner?  This
is, IMO, one of the biggest WAF bottlenecks. 

Oh and just try paging through all of those Star Trek episodes to get
down to the Star Wars movies...

So, ideally, a TV show is a TV show, no matter how it got into Myth. 
Episode metadata should be fetched for every show via imdb or what have
you, and once the user says they want to watch a TV show instead of a
movie or whatever, the interface queries for all TV episodes and
presents a few options for narrowing the selection down (by freshness,
by show name, by first air date, genre, whatever).  The user doesn't
necessarily know or care that the episode they are about to watch just
aired and was captured by Myth, or was fetched via BitTorrent & RSS
feed, or that it was a DVD rip. 

So all of the media known to Myth is available through one interface, as
opposed to a bunch of disjointed plugins each giving their own
interface.  Yes, plugins are still extremely valuable for describing to
Myth different media object types, the sort of metadata that needs to be
kept on each media type and how to get it, etc.  The devil is in the
details, of course, but the payoff is huge.

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