System Plugin for nPVR - Early Beta

[imilne]

Ok, here's a mock screenshot of the kind of thing I'm working on. I'd like your thoughts on it if possible.

Remember that this is a "System" plugin, and that this is to be a "Tuner Status" screen to go along with the existing "Drives Status" one. With that in mind, should each list item be titled with the tuner in question rather than the recording name? It makes sense based on the plugin's functionality, but it also seems very repetitive. But I also feel if I did it the other way 'round, then it's nothing more than another "Recordings" screen, and we already have one of those.

What information should get included? You can see the sort of data I can grab - names, channels, start/end times, file sizes, paths, etc. The full path is always way too long. Is the channel important? Should we do channel logos rather than those (currently gawd awful) PCI card ones I've found. I was planning on unique icons per tuner type (DVB-T, DVB-S, etc) but maybe most people only have one type making them pointless?

Is two lines of text enough? My particular tuners have very verbose names - what are yours like? (nPVR's devices tab will say). My feeling is that it would probably be ok to squeeze something like the filesize onto the first line too.

This list is a single list of all recordings across all tuners. I felt it was better that way (not to mention easier to code) than a separate list per tuner. Although that would simplify some of the things I've talked about above, I'd guess most people would have no more than 2-3 recordings on the go at once under most circumstances, making a single list more suitable.

Final point - I was planning on having the existing "Drives status" the default view when nothing was recording, switching to the "Tuner status" one automatically when stuff was. The new "View" button would override that choice at any time.

Looking forward to your opinions...

[Reddwarf]

Ok, here's a mock screenshot of the kind of thing I'm working on. I'd like your thoughts on it if possible.

Remember that this is a "System" plugin, and that this is to be a "Tuner Status" screen to go along with the existing "Drives Status" one. With that in mind, should each list item be titled with the tuner in question rather than the recording name? It makes sense based on the plugin's functionality, but it also seems very repetitive. But I also feel if I did it the other way 'round, then it's nothing more than another "Recordings" screen, and we already have one of those.

What information should get included? You can see the sort of data I can grab - names, channels, start/end times, file sizes, paths, etc. The full path is always way too long. Is the channel important? Should we do channel logos rather than those (currently gawd awful) PCI card ones I've found. I was planning on unique icons per tuner type (DVB-T, DVB-S, etc) but maybe most people only have one type making them pointless?

Is two lines of text enough? My particular tuners have very verbose names - what are yours like? (nPVR's devices tab will say). My feeling is that it would probably be ok to squeeze something like the filesize onto the first line too.

This list is a single list of all recordings across all tuners. I felt it was better that way (not to mention easier to code) than a separate list per tuner. Although that would simplify some of the things I've talked about above, I'd guess most people would have no more than 2-3 recordings on the go at once under most circumstances, making a single list more suitable.

Final point - I was planning on having the existing "Drives status" the default view when nothing was recording, switching to the "Tuner status" one automatically when stuff was. The new "View" button would override that choice at any time.

Looking forward to your opinions...

From what I can see, this looks jolly good Don't squeeze in too much information, it becoms harder to read.

[pcostanza]

My 2250 and HDHR are long as well and similar to the amount yours show. And I do agree with Reddwarf that too much info can be a bad thing.
On a side note, I would still like to see the taskbar icon show more info when hovering over it but that's way off topic from your plugin. Thanks for your fine work!

[imilne]

Here's another layout style. I think I quite like this one now, despite what I said earlier

The terrible-looking grey text is actually white; not sure why it's looking so poor in the screen capture.

Iain

[pcostanza]

That's what I'm talking bout!

[johnsonx42]

Looks great, I think I'll be implementing your system plugin upon your next release.

I think one thing that might make it more user friendly would be to allow a custom name for each tuner to be defined in the settings screen for your plugin (or in a config file). The raw driver names can be very cryptic, and rather repetitive for those with multiples of the same tuner. Even though this is a "System" screen, it is still end-user facing.

[Nistrod]

I'm using 0.10.7.18. For some reason, the next recording is in -57 minutes! See attached image.

[mark_lt]

A few slow responses.
1) I asked previously about the manual entering of disk space. The reason I don't partition is I have very little space as it is so want to be a bit more flexible with regards to pagefiles etc. I'm a single sad case so ignore this request
2) I think the second layout looks great
3) Nimrod, I have the same problem, generally when I cancel a recording, or if the recording has failed. An NPVR issue I think, but I know Sub is working on quite a few related things for the next release, so I have not worried to much about it (from other posts it seemed that way anyway).

Another special request:
I know the limits of this, for example everyone's recordings take up more or less space, and I for one transcode, but.... Under the disc usage, it might be a bit more user friendly to say how many minutes/hours of recording space are left. You could use the Sub TS file as the measure and just make a 'standard' figure to calculate

[imilne]

3) Nimrod, I have the same problem, generally when I cancel a recording, or if the recording has failed. An NPVR issue I think, but I know Sub is working on quite a few related things for the next release, so I have not worried to much about it (from other posts it seemed that way anyway).

Yes, it seems to be an nPVR issue. That version of the plugin parsed an XML document returned by the recording service, and it would still contain recordings after they'd be cancelled in its pending section. The same information can be seen in the tray app. For the next version, I'm actually grabbing the data using a different method (ScheduledRecording objects) and everything appears as it should. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the old method when sub releases the next version though.

Another special request:
I know the limits of this, for example everyone's recordings take up more or less space, and I for one transcode, but.... Under the disc usage, it might be a bit more user friendly to say how many minutes/hours of recording space are left. You could use the Sub TS file as the measure and just make a 'standard' figure to calculate

Do Sky+ boxes do something like this? It's so long since I've used one I can't remember. One option might be to get the user to enter their average MB/min values for both SD and HD recordings. Maybe it would be ok - I don't know - but it probably varies too much by country (and channel) for me to hard code it.

Iain

[sub]

Yes, it seems to be an nPVR issue. That version of the plugin parsed an XML document returned by the recording service, and it would still contain recordings after they'd be cancelled in its pending section. The same information can be seen in the tray app.

This is fixed in the next release.