Resuming playback; Auto pausing Live-TV etc.

[cannondale0815]

Hey sub!

Here is a small compilation of suggestions I have for you after having test driven your very cool PVR software for the past two days. Some of these suggestions are derived from my prior experience with a commercial DVR set-top-box from my previous cable company (model was a Scientific Atlanta 8000 dual-tuner DVR). I apologize in advance if there is any redundancy with previously submitted suggestions from other people (I did my best to search the forums beforehand).

1) After having finished watching a recorded show (i.e. I have fully watched it or I am pressing the stop button), it would be useful to be asked if I want to delete the show I just watched. This was the case with my previous DVR and is a convenient shortcut instead of having to go to the list of recorded shows and delete it manually from there. The assumption I am making here is that people normally want to delete shows they have finished watching to conserve disk space.

2) When stopping the playback of a recorded show, it would be cool if there was a way to resume it later on. On my previous DVR, when choosing to play a recorded show, it would ask me if I want to watch it from the beginning or from where I left off last time. This could be achieved by storing a text file (similar to the comskip text file) that keeps track of the position where one pressed stop during playback.

3) Similarly, if I am in the process of watching Live TV but want to just quickly go through the TV Guide to see what else is on, it might be useful to automatically pause (and keep paused) the show I am currently watching in case I change my mind and return to it without having choosen a different show. Alternatively, a full OSD version of the TV Guide that can be superimposed on top of a running live show would be even cooler. The mini guide is halfway there already, but a full version would be fantastic. On my previous DVR, when pressing the guide button, it would switch to a view where I could still see the current tv show in the upper right hand corner (similar to PIP), while the remaining real estate of the screen was used to display the program grid and detail information about the selected shows.

4) During playback of a show that is still in the process of being recorded (timeshift): When I catch up with 'real time' during fast forward, it should switch to 'play' and disallow any further forwarding. Currently, it just stops the playback and requires me to watch the show from the beginning again.

5) After having scheduled a future recording, it would be useful if it were possible to later on alter recording options such as the recording quality without having to cancel that recording and reschedule it with modified settings.

6) I noticed that when I cancelled a running recording, it doesn't automatically disappear from the 'pending' view (the partially recorded show should disappear from 'pending' and now be in 'ready'. It only disappears when going away and returning to the 'pending' view. Not a biggie, just a minor bug.

Thanks for reading this sub! I can only imagine how busy you are with all the various requests, but I hope that some of these suggestions are useful.

-Jan

P.S.: I should have mentioned that I am using the MediaMVP as playback device. Just in case that there are differences in behavior between it and the GB-PVR viewer application.

[sub]

Quote[/b] ]2) When stopping the playback of a recorded show, it would be cool if there was a way to resume it later on. On my previous DVR, when choosing to play a recorded show, it would ask me if I want to watch it from the beginning or from where I left off last time. This could be achieved by storing a text file (similar to the comskip text file) that keeps track of the position where one pressed stop during playback.

This can be enabled by selecting the "Prompt for resume" option in the config app.

[cannondale0815]

FANTASTIC!!! This is really nice and increases the usefulness by a huge degree! Didn't realize it was there all along! And it works beautifully! Thanks!