[mythtv-users] iPhone Frontend Issues

Chase Douglas chasedouglas.lists at gmail.com
Wed Mar 18 18:07:40 UTC 2009


On Mar 18, 2009, at 1:36 PM, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
> Might it be possible, in lieu of being able to skip around in the
> stream, to use the commflagger/transcoder to split out segments
> into separate files and use them as a playlist?  If the commflagger
> was perfect, every other segment would be an ad and an entire segment
> could just be skipped by the user saying "next file" on playback.  If
> comflagging blew it on that ad, the user just plays.  (If it blows it
> on when the ad starts/ends but gets it mostly right, well, you'd have
> to play the whole segment anyway or miss some of the show, but this
> way at least you -might- be able to skip some/all of the ads without
> having general-purpose seeking capability.)

I like this idea. I'm not sure how well it will work in practice, but  
I'll try it out. My biggest concern with this approach is that what  
would essential happen is at every commercial break the frontend would  
exit the stream and reenter later on. This means the video player  
interface would close, then reopen. When it reopens, it will need to  
reestablish the stream buffer again, which I suppose it would have to  
do anyways.

I guess the main drawback to this idea is that you will only be able  
to seek within a given segment. If you are in the first segment of the  
show, the player is only going to show the seek bar relative to that  
segment. The user won't be able to seek to a later segment easily.

I think even with that drawback some users would like the commercial  
skip support like this. I probably won't work on it at first, but in  
the future I'll kick it around some and maybe make it an option for  
those who know what they're doing.

Thanks,
Chase


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list