[mythtv-users] iPhone Frontend Issues

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:27:27 -0400
    > From: Chris Pinkham <cpinkham at bc2va.org>

    > * On Tue Mar 17, 2009 at 11:16:01PM -0400, Josh White wrote:
    > > I'll second the vote for the Apple player using the hardware decoding.  I'd
    > > rather have a partially featured system that worked well, looked good, etc.

    > I'll agree on using the Apple player as well.  I probably wouldn't touch
    > LiveTV with this at all, so losing the ability to change channels during
    > playback is not a real loss to me.  One of the items on my (very) long TODO
    > list is to allow storing multiple files per recording entry.  This would
    > allow storing a pre-encoded file in the right format for playing with the
    > Apple player.  That could be copied to the iPod/iPhone or streamed using
    > your app.  Now that I have my own 16GB Touch the multi-file feature is
    > moving up in priority on my TODO so I can keep some pre-encoded shows
    > around.

Might it be possible, in lieu of being able to skip around in the
stream, to use the commflagger/transcoder to split out segments
into separate files and use them as a playlist?  If the commflagger
was perfect, every other segment would be an ad and an entire segment
could just be skipped by the user saying "next file" on playback.  If
comflagging blew it on that ad, the user just plays.  (If it blows it
on when the ad starts/ends but gets it mostly right, well, you'd have
to play the whole segment anyway or miss some of the show, but this
way at least you -might- be able to skip some/all of the ads without
having general-purpose seeking capability.)