[mythtv-users] questions and ideas

[Ben Levitt]

I'm loving my Myth box!  It's working well for me. 
But of course I have a few ideas for small
improvements.  :)  (by the way, I'm using cvs from
yesterday just before cvs went down...  (I hope all
the energy-less East Coasters among us are doing
fine...) )


Contrast/Brightness/Color/etc.

 - Right now I am only able to change the picture
values for the encoder card.  I'd also really like the
ability to change the Xv display values for these
properties as well.  If it records a little too dark,
I want to be able to up the brightness at decode-time.
 I know that quality-wise, it's not as good as getting
the values right at encoding time, but given that the
damage is done, it would be nice to have a way to make
the best of what I've got.  I realize that the UI for
this would be super-tricky to do in a way that's not
completely confusing, but assuming a good UI design
could be figured out, is adjusting the values pretty
easy?

 - Right now, to adjust the 4 picture parameters takes
8 keys.  I was thinking that for people using remotes
with a small or medium number of keys, it might work
better to use an interface where there's a
parameter-switching key that rotates through volume,
contrast, brightness, color, and hue, and then just
use the volume up/down keys to adjust the current
parameter.


Commercial Skipping

 - I've noticed when I'm watching tv (live or not),
and I use q or z to try to jump through commercials,
and there are no more commercial breaks in the
direction I jumped, that MythTV just sort of hangs for
a minute saying "Skip/Searching..." or something, and
then finally times out and comes back to life where it
left off.  It seems to me that before stopping
playback, it should quickly figure out if it has
anywhere to skip to or not, and if not, abort the
ad-skip without breaking playback.  The current
behavior is super annoying since I seem to just have
to sit and wait for the timout before I can fall back
to just using the regular fast forward / rewind keys.

 - Also, I have a PVR-250, and was sad to find out
that MythTV can't detect commercials during live tv
watching.  Is it really out of the question to run the
full commercial-flagging thread concurrently with
recording, and have it flag commercials as soon as it
can tell where they are?  I know it might need to keep
analyzing past the end of commercials by another 30
seconds or a minute to see if there are still more ads
in an ad break, but then if it could flag the ads,
just lagging by a minute or so, then watching slightly
delayed live tv would be nicer...   If running the
full ad-flagging thread concurrently with recording is
not an option, then how gnarly a challenge would it be
to add ivtv support to the simpler live-tv commercial
skipping code (or do I have that inside out?)

Thanks lots!

ben

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