[mythtv-users] MythTV vs XBMC

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

On 8 May 2014 15:15, Shawn King <slackerlinux85 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> also forgot to add in regards to multiple matches for video metadata it
> would be nice to show the filename your matching to(looked into adding that
> but looks like that wouldn't be easy with the current code? it can be
> difficult when your adding multiple files some remakes to the database and
> guessing which ones correct) also would be nice if more themes added the
> year field to the results list i didnt know that was even possible till i
> looked into adding that and found its already in and used by the terra theme

Lots of ideas here...

I agree with that one, and with many of the one listed earlier...

Metadata does suck on mythtv, and so does the interface to retrieve them...
It does need a complete overall and I have to say that the current
code handling metadata is a total mess. It received a lot of attention
for 0.27 and remove all the bugs in it, but it was still just putting
lipstick on a bulldog.

IMHO, when you do a scan all, there's no point prompting the user to
choose which metadata match best over and over. Better fill all the
videos where there's no ambiguity and don't prompt the user. Sometimes
I find myself pressing ESC over and over simply because I :1- don't
know which video it's referring to, as the title found is very remote
to the original, 2-if it can't find it now, i can't be bothered to
spend time doing it now.
My typical scenario for doing scan all is that I've just added videos
and i want to watch them now. So I don't care about videos that were
added long ago and it needs some help.

Instead, I would prefer to have a dedicated screen, with all the
videos for which no metadata were retrieved, so I can, when I have
time, easily go and work on those.

i also would like to have an option for the file to be renamed
automatically so it's nice and tidy. However this is borderline of
mythtv fair use policy as we all know what this feature would be for
and some myth dev are religiously against it (i'm not)

In the mythtv vs xbmc thread, I'd like people to read the xbmc
announcement for 13.0 that just got released:
http://xbmc.org/xbmc-13-0-gotham-rises/

and look at the features that are now finally supported in xbmc that
have been available for years in myth. In this regards, it's pretty
fair to say that while myth lack the bell and whistle of xbmc,
feature-wise myth is really not that backward. Quite the opposite and
is still at the forefront technology-wise


Having said that, it would be a shame to forget some of the
suggestions mentioned in the past few days here.
To make sure they aren't lost.
Please open a mythtv ticket (code.mythtv.org), and assign them to me
(jyavenard). Some frown upon the "request without patch" thing... I
don't.

Personally, in the thing I'd like to add.
>From an architecture level. Get rid of the database configuration in
the frontend. It should do everything through the backend so we can
really have plug&play. Start the frontend, select a backend (if more
than one), play.

Get rid of all the playback profile configuration stuff. It should
work out of the box, and use automatically the best the hardware
provide: vdpau, vaapi, opengl etc.. Only have a simple checkbox for
"high-quality" that will enable settings for more powerful hardware
(equivalent to selecting VDPAU High Quality, or OpenGL High Quality)
etc...

>From a usability perspective:
- be able to use the numeric keypad of the remote to enter text, just
like T9. Searching a video is just too painful.

In regards to organising files, people mentioned on how xbmc is much
better in that regards. But how is that so? from my experience it's
pretty much just as good (or more likely, just as bad depending on how
you see it). It's either sorted by files (see the directory tree), or
sorted by name/genre/category/whatever.