How about instead of tuning between a bunch of different channels do a grid snapshot view of all the programs in the recorded program list.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/31/06, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:f-myth-users@media.mit.edu">
f-myth-users@media.mit.edu</a></b> <<a href="mailto:f-myth-users@media.mit.edu">f-myth-users@media.mit.edu</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:59:38 -0600<br> From: Kevin Kuphal <<a href="mailto:kuphal@dls.net">kuphal@dls.net</a>><br><br> To me it sounds like a holdover from pre-program guide days. Why watch<br> 100 images that change every few seconds when you can just look at the
<br> program guide to see what is on (with descriptions)?<br><br>I think the original poster also liked the eye candy aspect of it;<br>a poor man's "cable company control room wall of monitors", perhaps.<br><br>
Myself, I'm considering whipping up something like this as a<br>diagnostic aid, though without the "refresh all the time" and<br>"interactivity" parts. My sources often move channels around without<br>
keeping Zap2It properly in the loop, transmit black video, flake out<br>and transmit screensaver-like things from the headend saying "No<br>Video", occasionally reset the cable box so it -claims- it's on one<br>
channel but is in reality on some completely random channel, and a<br>variety of other misbehavior. It'd be convenient to have a little<br>display that gets updated every so often with a matrix of all the<br>channels on it; that way, I can spot something going bad long in
<br>advance, rather than ex post facto, after I've already got a bad<br>recording. In particular, knowing in advance might allow me to<br>schedule extra recordings on channels that repeat a lot, whereas a bad<br>recording is often not spotted until the next day or so (since I don't
<br>monitor everything in real time---it's a PVR, after all) which is<br>usually too late to catch a same-evening repeat (often the only<br>repeat available).<br><br>This might also be handy when travelling, as a sanity check that the
<br>various inputs are still getting something reasonable, again in time<br>to have someone fix something, since it's pretty easy to just ssh in<br>and look at the image matrix, or even have it sent somewhere, as<br>opposed to trying to (essentially) flip through live video through
<br>what's probably a high-latency, low-bandwidth pipe.<br><br>[This stuff is sort of the dual of some automation ideas I mentioned<br>here months ago, e.g., detectors that notice "too few pixels have<br>changed in the last n seconds/minutes---frozen or black video is being
<br>transmitted" [my local PBS affiliates are notorious for this in the<br>wee hours], or "the recording is way too short 'cause the tuner lost<br>lock", etc etc, with the goal of having Myth auto-reschedule if it
<br>detects that something went bad.]<br><br>P.S. Next bit of eye candy---build two matrices, do a pixel-by-pixel<br>XOR, and display the results. Frozen video would pop out as solid<br>black; CNN-like channels might look interesting because of the crawl
<br>and/or talking-heads pseudo-static effect; typical channels would look<br>pretty random but it might be a somewhat artsy effect. Maybe it could<br>be used as one of MythMusic's visualizations...<br>_______________________________________________
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