[mythtv-users] how to improve Myth (was "OT: I'm streaming Netflix on my Linux box")

jedi jedi at mishnet.org
Wed Oct 8 03:03:51 UTC 2008


On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 10:18:18PM -0400, Magnus wrote:
> Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> > They've already cornered themselves in their respective rooms and are  
> > redesigning the entire foundation the UI is built on. 
> 
> This is very good to hear. 
> 
> If I may suggest something for consideration and discussion, though, I
> think there are some back-end considerations to keep in mind as well.
> 
> Right now, every media type that Myth deals with is handled in vastly
> different ways.  If I record a TV show through a tuner, I watch it
> through one facility.  If I download an episode via BitTorrent, it's
> lumped in with all of the other videos not capture directly by Myth's
> tuners.
> 
> Music is handled somewhere else.
> 
> Optical media is handled in a different way.
> 
> Then there's photographs...
> 
> See where I'm going?
> 
> IMHO, every media object known to MythTV should be cataloged and
> accessed through one simple interface, using canned and custom queries
> to filter down what the viewer wants to see/hear.

    Agreed. The view of media should be as unified as possible.

> 
> If I'm Mr. Star Trek Ubergeek and have every episode of every Star Trek
> series ripped from DVD into Myth, why should they be viewed any
> differently than the latest Stargate Atlantis captured by a tuner?  This
> is, IMO, one of the biggest WAF bottlenecks. 
> 
> Oh and just try paging through all of those Star Trek episodes to get
> down to the Star Wars movies...

     That's a bit silly. Just put the Star Trek episodes in a separate
directory. You don't have to shove everything in the same place.

     Now what's dicey is keeping track of where you are within a 
particular series. This can be a drag both in Recordings and 
Videos. I have a little hack that handles this in MythVideo by
keeping track of a current episode "pointer".

     There's a nice new feature along these lines in 0.21. MythVideo
remembers where you browsed last. Remembering this on a per folder
basis could be handy and an alternative to my notion of tracking 
the last viewed file in each directory. It should also be global.

> 
> So, ideally, a TV show is a TV show, no matter how it got into Myth. 
> Episode metadata should be fetched for every show via imdb or what have
> you, and once the user says they want to watch a TV show instead of a
> movie or whatever, the interface queries for all TV episodes and
> presents a few options for narrowing the selection down (by freshness,
> by show name, by first air date, genre, whatever).  The user doesn't
> necessarily know or care that the episode they are about to watch just
> aired and was captured by Myth, or was fetched via BitTorrent & RSS
> feed, or that it was a DVD rip. 
> 
> So all of the media known to Myth is available through one interface, as
> opposed to a bunch of disjointed plugins each giving their own
> interface.  Yes, plugins are still extremely valuable for describing to
> Myth different media object types, the sort of metadata that needs to be
> kept on each media type and how to get it, etc.  The devil is in the
> details, of course, but the payoff is huge.
> 



> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list