[mythtv] Re: Looking for suggestions: Smarter Screen Grabbing

[bobnvic at everestkc.net]

Ramon Redondo wrote:
<some text snipped>
>Ideally, I'd like to patch this to take into account the start offset 
>(RecordPreRoll?) of the program, but the database doesn't currently 
>store that information on a program by program basis. 
>
>Since that isn't currently available, I've thought of several ideas:
>1)  Use the _current_ RecordPreRoll and add 64 seconds to it to 
>determine where to take a screen grab.
>2)  Take the start and end time of the recording, find the 'middle', and 
>add some offset (64?) to that.
>
>I personally think that I prefer #2, although it would have to handle 
>the case where a grab is requested before the program completes.
>
>I'm more than happy to implement something, but I wanted to get some 
>other opinions on this.
>Any thoughts?

Although 1 seems like a good solution to me, I'd also like to mention
some other thoughts which may be overkill, but something to consider.

Since programs vary in the times that they schedule their commercials,
it might be nice to have a customizable offset per program.  This would
probably best be on the advanced screen for program scheduling.

I've often wished I had the ability to set the screen grab to the image of
my choice while in the editing mode and cutting commercials.  Perhaps
another key that meant 'replace the current screen grab with this frame'.
This would be great for shows that I want to keep around for a while and
currently have an image of some commercial everytime I look in mythweb
(like all of my M*A*S*H episodes), even though the commercials are long
gone.

I realize that either of these may be much more than you were looking to
do for this patch, but on the off chance that you do like either of these, I
thought they might be worth mentioning.

Bob C.