What UI would you like to see and how would it behave?

cathrynm · 2009-12-02, 05:25 AM

Actually, I'm happy with the main user interface, but the 'Digital Channel Mapping screen' can be frustrating. I'm not sure how many HDTV channels you have in New Zealand, but here in Northern California it takes a lot of time to sort all this out. Anyway, I can't really complain because the program is free, but, err, you asked!

1. Sort the Digital Channels Found section by channel #.
2. If during following a Rescan or a Manual Scan an identical channel is found again, do not duplicate the channel in the list.
3. If Following a 'Rescan' a channel is not found, mark it in some way. (Suggest *)
4. Provide a 'delete' button to remove from the 'Digital Channels found' -- any highlighted channel.
5. Mark in some ways in the "Digital Channels Found" section those channels which are already mapped to an EPG channel. (Suggest checkmark)
6. Click on the 'EPG Channel Name' -- then click on 'Digital Channels Found during Scan' entry, and then it maps the channel.
7. Provide a way to map multiple soundtracks to a single TV channel. And then have a soundtrack button to switch between them. When recording also provide an option to choose which soundtrack is used. (It is strange here, channels do have multiple soundtracks, but often what is played on the alternate sound tracks is nothing, or a duplicate of the original sound. Sometimes it is actual useful audio. I admit, this is a bit more than a UI update. Sorry.)
8. Config is sometimes quirky when adding a recording service and then programming. Sometimes I have to save and then come back to the config menu to fix this.

steeb · 2009-12-02, 08:21 AM

I don't ask for much as reading through it has all been said!

But I would add my vote to:

Quote:Oh yes - the resurrection of entering text for a search via the PCH/MVP remote would be very welcome.

Has been missing for a while now, would be great to see it return.......

Cheers

Steeb

soccerdad · 2009-12-02, 11:15 PM

I see lots of great suggestions here. Some are universal and others are for specific features. The main thing the current interface has going for it is that it is simple and easy to use. I think simplicity should trump many other features. Ease of use leads to a high WAF, and if momma aint happy, nobodys happy. Wink

Being able to configure display features from the main interface would be great, but try to keep any configuration at the user page level to a minimum. My wife loves to find the wrong button to push, then I get yelled at.:eek:

From the simplicity front, would it be possible to make the video library less "computer like" and not have directory structures that you have to search? We have videos stored on several machines and it would be great to have all videos from all machines listed in one, alphabetical list. You pick what you want to watch and it knows in the background what computer it is on. That way you don't have to hunt around. Perhaps some simple filters could be picked to reduce the list if you have too many vids to scroll through.

gEd · 2009-12-03, 12:27 AM

I never really fell in love with the way the buttons zoom when you scroll through them. Similarly, I would like to see (at least to compare) pop up windows that just appear rather than zoom in from the background.

IMHO, there's still something not quite right with the fonts used for the menu items. We discussed this when pvrx2 first came but I'm not sure how the discussion ended. (probably with me being wrong).

I wonder if people might be interested in the tv guide browsing being slightly more nippy? Would it perhaps be a little faster when scrolling around the tv guide/TV Listings if it didn;t bother to display the show details unless no button has been pressed for x 10ths of a sec. So if I quickly scroll right with the remote/keyboard, the show description doesn;t appear until I briefly pause on a show. Perhaps I'm talking crap here.

TV Listings: I want to see channel icons (only, no numbers) that take up no more screem space than they need in order to maximise the amount of tv listings I can get on the screen. At the moment, there is a large rectangle around them.

For me the biggest "gap" is that Revens My Videos doesn't seem likely to make it into production. I would really like to see an all-in-one, all-singing, all-dancing Video Manager that basically enables me to do whatever I could ever conceivable want to do with a recording, all from one plugin. I would like to :-

Browse movies, whether they are recent recordings, iplayer plugin downloads, torrent plugin downloads or dvd rips without worrying about where they are located. (i.e. a videos database).

(Like soccerdad and others suggested), view my recordings and videos by category/genre. IIRC, a couple of years ago I suggested having the genre tab available to select when a recording is scheduled and being able to filter on this field (e.g. kids. movies)

Edit/mark adverts and then
burn to dvd
transcode
cut adverts from mpeg

Just like Burndvd and skiptool plugins.

Option to archive (i.e. relocate) to another disk.

Option to copy to memory stick al la McBains old files plugin.

Download extra data and images from imdb, amazon etc.

oh and I'd like to see AUTO .ts to mpeg/xvid/H.264 etc working.

oh and bringing more of the functionality of config.exe inside the gbpvr "System" menu. The playback codec and skin settings were a great start and it would be useful to be able to add/remove plugins without restarting the recording service.

:-)

LewE · 2009-12-03, 01:20 AM

gEd Wrote:TV Listings: I want to see channel icons (only, no numbers) that take up no more screem space than they need in order to maximise the amount of tv listings I can get on the screen. At the moment, there is a large rectangle around them.

You could make those changes yourself but it would mean you would have to tinker with the skin.xml file to change the positions of the features.

gEd · 2009-12-03, 01:26 AM

I know. I think I did this in the past (afetr hacking around) but then lost the setting when I upgraded the skin (not a biggie). However it seems to me like it should really be like that out of the box when you want icon view only.

whurlston · 2009-12-03, 02:00 AM

gEd Wrote:...Browse movies, whether they are recent recordings, iplayer plugin downloads, torrent plugin downloads or dvd rips without worrying about where they are located. (i.e. a videos database)...

Personally, I prefer to keep recordings separate from my video library. I'm sure there's mixed feelings about this so probably best to have an option like <AddRecordingsToVideoLibrary> that can be enabled or disabled.

whurlston · 2009-12-03, 02:01 AM

gEd Wrote:I know. I think I did this in the past (afetr hacking around) but then lost the setting when I upgraded the skin (not a biggie). However it seems to me like it should really be like that out of the box when you want icon view only.

sub, this is where the separate DataFolder could come in handy. Big Grin

markbb1 · (This post was last modified: 2009-12-03, 02:52 AM by markbb1.)

sub Wrote:What exactly do you like about it? I'd prefer to not install it here, but I'm happy to hear why you like about it. The screenshots on the website look a bit haphazard.

The documentation on the site is sparse compared to GBPVR. It sorely needs a manual with screenshots for configuring it. But the default color scheme is appealing to me. The navigation is on par with GBPVR, and even more intuitive (to me anyway). Since GBPVR does everything that Got All Media does, it is hard to quantify. I just know that I prefer the look, and navigation is easy.

I haven't played with GBPVR to figure out if/how it can do an on-screen epg that is a semi-transparent overlay on live, full-screen tv, but that is one sweet piece of eye-candy (I can try to post a screenshot). Also, in Got All Media, hitting the Info button twice brings up credits and other program details that I don't think are in the GBPVR guide database (again, I can try to post a screenshot). Pretty much any fields supported by the XMLTV standard, and exist in the data file, will be displayed. The idea of using an xml file to map channel icons to channels is a bit more elegant to me than trying to rename the icon images to agree with the channel-ids or display-names, even if not any easier or faster.

I don't know if GBPVR would let me set up one capture source to get audio from the l/r analog audio and video from the s-video input, and another source with composite video and audio from the tuner, but that was how I was running Got All Media in England. The s-video and audio came from my PAL cable box and the composite and tuner/audio came from my NTSC satellite box. I only have two PCI slots on my MSI Hetis PC and one of those was used by the wireless card, so I had to get both sources into one capture card. With Got All Media, my Kworld MCE 100 Pro would automagically switch between PAL and NTSC depending on which STB the channel I selected (from the EPG, or entering a channel number with the remote) was coming from. GBPVR wouldn't work for me at the time because the Kworld MCE 100 Pro doesn't have a hardware mpeg encoder. I am now in the US with one source and replaced the Kworld card with a Hauppauge PVR-350, which I installed when it looked like Got All Media was dead and I focused on GBPVR to fill my HTPC needs. Shortly after I got GBPVR working, the Got All Media wiki and forums came back on line and I tried it again. I have to say, I like it as much as ever.

FWIW, I am shallow and a "Got All Media" skin for GBPVR might give it the same appeal.

I just noticed that I am labeled as a "Senior Member". Is that because I am old or because I have been a member for a certain length of time?

LewE · 2009-12-03, 02:55 AM

gEd Wrote:I know. I think I did this in the past (afetr hacking around) but then lost the setting when I upgraded the skin (not a biggie). However it seems to me like it should really be like that out of the box when you want icon view only.

Since the changes to make the icon/channel "column" be narrower and, presumably, make more screen area available for the listings are so extensive it is unlikely that they would happen automatically when a user indicates only the channel or icon should be displayed for the channel.

I think a reasonable way to handle this is the have the TV Listings, in addition to having a skin.xml file, have two additional variations of the skin.xml file: skin with single channel id.xml and skin with two IDs per channel.xml. The user then could rename the one they want to use to be skin.xml.

I would volunteer to make the two skin file variants but I am struggling with a whole bunch of issues on my computer now-a-days. Maybe if you took one more shot at making the changes and pass the new file along to the skin developer they would agree to include both variants in the skin release.

I know Fatman_do is amenable to incorporating changes from users into the Community Skin.