[mythtv] Re: Watching the Watchers Re: Proposed alternate behaviour for show delete

[Brad Templeton]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 04:22:12PM -0500, Tony Lill wrote:
> Geoffrey Kruse <gkruse at gmail.com> writes:
> watching. I always thought it would be nice if I could put bookmarks
> in my cooking shows at the points I'm interested in and hop between
> them. You could probably clone the editing code to manage them. 

One could, and there is a lot of merit in the "never throw away information"
approach, but there is also a merit in not adding to an already bursting-with-
choices UI except for very prime features.   So a stack of bookmarks,
which defaults to the most recently set, could have a use, if you can
find a UI that doesn't add yet-another-key.   Possibly the commercial
skip set (home/end) could also include the bookmarks.

If you are working on the bookmark code, another thing I would find
very, very useful is if, when you set the field to start all recordings
some number of seconds early, that the playback begin not at the recording
start, but at the scheduled start time.   If it turns out the program aired
early, you can rewind to the real start.   Note I don't refer to the manual
setting of an early start for an individual program, which one only does
when one really means it due to the automatic ability.

Why haven't I done this?  Mostly because the trivial way to do it (place
signal time into bookmark field) would cause every program to appear to
have a bookmark which would bother people.  I suppose one could put in a
test so that a bookmark at exactly the scheduled start time is treated
as not a bookmark.

If you want to get fancy, I would even change the OSD to display the scheduled
start as "0" and times before it has negative.

ie.

Right now a one hour show with 1 minute of padding fore and aft starts play
1 minute before schedule, and displays as 1 hour 2 minutes long.

I would prefer it start play one minute into the show, allowing up to a minute
of rewind, and that this display as a negative time index in the OSD.

It's not hard to figure how to do this with an extra database field in
recorded but hmmm....  Now I see that for some reason bookmark is a
varchar(128) so in fact there is plenty of latitude to expand its function,
including what I describe and a stack.  Something to look at when I get
back from my trip.