[mythtv-users] What is being worked on for 0.26?

[Preston Crow]

Lots of good discussion here, but I don't think we're going far enough. 
  Why shouldn't we merge videos, recordings, photos, and games into a 
generic "media" storage?  I'm serious here--hear me out.  (Besides, what 
is Mythgame but a clone of Mythvideo using external media players that 
happen to be game emulators instead of video players?)

There are two things to consider, and they can be independent:  How do 
we track things in the database, and how do we display them in the user 
interface.  In general, if we segregate things in the backend database, 
it is difficult to merge them in the user interface, but going the other 
way is easy.

So what we need to track media is a combination of tags and metadata. 
I'll define a tag as a value that is either present or absent for a 
media file, like "game" or "auto-expire."  A metadatum is much like a 
tag, but it is a key-value pair, such as "Title: Babylon 5" or "Cutlist: 
<internal reference>."  (Of course, my tags could just be metadata with 
a blank value for the key, which might further simplify the implementation.)

If we converted all our current media stores to use tags and metadata in 
a manner like I described, we could then easily merge things in 
interesting ways, probably including many that developers never 
considered.  For example, a good music playlist system could be used for 
slideshows of photos.

The user interface could stay the same with this change, and new options 
could be provided that combine and segregate various media types in 
different ways.  The goal for the backend design should be to provide 
maximum flexibility for the frontend.