[mythtv-users] 5x smooth FF and other Olympic wishes

[Brad Templeton]

MythTV is by far the best tool for watching a lot of Olympics coverage in a short
time.  Tools like speedup-with-pitch-adjusted-audio, smooth 3x FF, the wide variety of
FF speeds, and the customizable seek keys in playback groups are fabulous and
blow away any other DVR.

While I know that wishlists without code are of pretty limited value, here are
some thoughts on how to improve sports viewing in DVRs that could be of use
here.


a) Pre-computed fast-forwarding.   A background task could build a stream at around 10x
speed, transcoded with seek indexes to tie it to the main stream.   This stream would
have sped-up, pitch adjusted sound as well.   It would have a higher incidence of i-frames
and be used for most fast-forwarding (except up to 3x essentially.)   This would result
in smooth fast forwarding up to 30x if desired, based on Myth's ability to do smooth normal vid
at 3x.  It would allow smooth fast forwarding from 5x (half-speed play) to 20x with
sound.   It would also allow smoother high speed fast forwarding with a smaller file to
read from and more i-frames.    Still-frame-jerk FF is still possible in this case.

And I don't think it would be all that large a file, but it would be an option you would
turn on to run this job and generate this file.  CC should be included, time-sped.

b) Multi-toggle of FF and closed caption.   Some TVs turn on CC when you mute, I would
like an option to turn on CC whenever I FF without sound.   Plus some ability to move
where the CC goes (though I presume I can do that in a custom theme)

c) Likewise, each network puts its text displays in different locations (usually bottom
of screen or upper left, sometimes upper right.)  It would be nice to be able to move
it without having to patch a theme, or indeed to move it based on the channel, or indeed
to have a really clever OSD that notices, "Hmm, these pixels in the image remain mostly
constant, perhaps they are the network's OSD and I should avoid going on top of them."
(OK, that one's really for extra credit.)   Another workaround -- make your video smaller
and use the black regions around it for OSD and CC.  You can sort of do this with manual
zoom but it doesn't automatically put OSD or CC in the missing region.

d) Multi-bookmarks -- to tag the start of an event I am skipping but want to watch later.
Put it into the commercial skip list perhaps.   Even cooler, shared bookmarks so the crowd
says, "here is the cool part to watch."

e) Closed caption sync -- it seems the captions, when I do turn them on, are several seconds
behind the actual speech.   Silly network should build an automatic tool that re-syncs them on
live broadcasts.   I don't expect myth to do that, but if there were a way to say "show captions
3 seconds in advance" in the same way I can change audio/video sync, it could fix that.  Alas,
that means seeking ahead in the file or putting captions in their own file which is complex.
The above FF file, containing captions, could be an answer to that.


f) Spoiler alert!   (This is fairly fancy.)   Download a list of Olympic event schedules
and the winners of events that have already transpired.   Then look for their names in
the closed captions and warn me about spoilers, offering to skip/mute/blank.

g) Mute the idiots:  Sometimes there is a second audio track with another language.  (Not in
this case on NBC, the track is identical.)  In the future this would provide a way to 
modify the audio track so that when the two tracks differ, you mute, so you don't hear
the idiots -- but can still read what they say.


Some of these are a bunch of coding so I don't plan to see them any time soon, but I
thought they would be good to get in people's minds.  Even without them, Myth is definitely
the only way to watch the Olympics.