[mythtv-users] WISH: "Surf Mode" like ATI Media Center

[Dwight Hubbard]

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.

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