Guide ideas - for future versions

[LilY0da]

OK, since now Sub has put the 0.95 series behind him, here's my thoughts for the future versions of the guide (both the normal one and the OSD one). Anyone chip in.

- have an option to show the channel number AND the channel image. When you have different people watching TV, some like me go by the logo, and the wife goes by the numbers.

- have an option so that the scroll forward and backward is in 30 minutes increments instead of 1 hour. Anyone else but me interested?

- when you scroll left or right, and your highlighted program is the one on the border, then the guide scrolls. However, the cursor doesn't move. So your guide has scrolled, but your cursor is still on the previous show. An additional side effect is that the highlighted show has also swicthed sides on the screen.
This seems really unnatural to me.
It's like when you scroll down a page in notepad, when your cursor hits the bottom, and you press down again. Then the screen in notepad scrolls, but your cursor also keeps going down. The current behavior seems odd to me. Am I the only one?

[ejeffers]

I agree with your second point, the guide scrolling by increments of a half-hour would be great and much appreciated. So yes I am definetly interested in that one.

[kaiger]

As far as showing the logo and number I like how directv handled it when I had that system years ago. It showed the logo until you had the cursor on that channel, then it replaced it with the abbreviated name and channel number. I think this is a more elegant solution than making two columns for both simultaneously.

[wtg]

Another enhancement for guide scrolling, the skip buttons skip a day at a time, which is great, but how about skipping a specified number of hours if the number is input and then the skip button is pressed?

When it's 8 am and I want to see what comes on tonight it's slow to scroll through twelve hours of guide.

[Endoc]

Including the channel number in the TV Guide would be a great improvement. Perhaps a check box in config to include a column for it would be a nice option. Just a thought-

[Torque]

How about including the 'marked' time periods for pending recordings while viewing the Live Guide like there is for the regular TV Guide. I like watching TV and surfing the guide and it'd be nicer to see if there's gonna be a conflict before I try to schedule a recording.

[toronto365]

Here is a humble suggestion from a noob:

If you want to incorporate channel icons and channel numbers, why not manually modify the channel icon bitmaps to include the channel number? I realize this might not be ideal for those with 1000+ channels, but I have done that for a handful of 'important' channels and the wife seems to like that

[murr]

Yeah I'd also like the half hour scroll. Should be easy to do right? Maybe sub just prefers hour?

[fbachofner]

- have an option so that the scroll forward and backward is in 30 minutes increments instead of 1 hour. Anyone else but me interested?

My guide scrolls to the beginning boundary of the next show. If a show is 30 minutes and I scroll forward, the scroll is 30 minutes. If the show is one hour, the scroll is one hour. On a two hour show the scroll will be two hours. (Same with reverse scrolling.)

This seems a very elegant solution and works the same on the PC as it does on the MVP. Does yours not work like this?

The only thing that CAN be frustrating (although I don't forsee an elegant solution) is that the scroll amount is different for different lines of the program guide. Still, it's kind of cool to be able to scroll "faster" by moving to a line with longer programs and "slower" by moving to a line with shorter programs.

This behavior has been consistent with my GBPVR as long as I can remember -- i.e. since at least version .89.x

[LilY0da]

My guide scrolls to the beginning boundary of the next show. If a show is 30 minutes and I scroll forward, the scroll is 30 minutes. If the show is one hour, the scroll is one hour. On a two hour show the scroll will be two hours. (Same with reverse scrolling.)

This seems a very elegant solution and works the same on the PC as it does on the MVP. Does yours not work like this?

It doesn't if the boundary of your show, or the next show is not within the current guide display. If the ending boundary of the selected show is past the current guide display, hit your button once and the guide will scroll, you have to hit the button again to move the cursor to the next show. That's what I mentionned in point #3

Point #1 refers to the guide always starting on a full hour.
AFAIK, your guide window never starts on a half hour. Always starts on a full hour.
To my knowledge, it's not possible to scroll the guide display half an hour to the right of the left, only full hours.

It becomes very annoying when you start the guide at let's say 8:35PM, and a whole collum of the guide is wasted in 30 minutes shows that have already ended.
And you can't scroll forward to reset it to 8:30 as the start time, cause it would scroll everything to have the start time at 9PM
The recent addition of the arrow that displays where the current time is in the guide timeline helps a bit (at least I don't try to hit "play" on shows that have ended as much as before).

That's what I meant when I suggested 30 minutes instead of 1 hour as the increment for scrolling the guide left and right.