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+---- Thread: Feature Requests (/showthread.php?tid=178996)
RE: Feature Requests - JazJon - 2014-02-27
Here are two requests as an ex-WMC power user
1) I mapped my Harmony remote's red key to the letter K so I can quickly get to my recordings list (great!) The thing is once I select a new show that was just recorded, it shows ALL the shows that were recorded. This is actually not bad, but I think the next pages highlighted selection should default to the latest recording second from the top, instead of the ".." at the very top
This way we can quickly play our latest recording of a show without having to engage the down key first. (understand?) boom boom shows starts (no fuss)
2) I noticed the only place we can see the show description is when you have the show highlighted on the recording list. (see last screen shot) Once
the show starts playing I don't see a quick way to review and re-read the show details. (info button doesn't work)
Is this anything that can be added? (or maybe I'm missing something?)
RE: Feature Requests - scarecrow420 - 2014-02-27
We cant control what list item is selected by default in the AddOn, that is just normal XBMC list behaviour
Regarding the 2nd one, Im not sure as well. It seems that Recordings playback area is kind of just the "Video Player" screen of XBMC and im not sure whether there is metadata support for these recording files. If the recording is completed, we do write the metadata into the WTV file but as it isnt being scanned into an XBMC library im not sure if XBMC can display the metadata. Another thing to try and look into
RE: Feature Requests - JazJon - 2014-02-27
(2014-02-27, 04:22)scarecrow420 Wrote: We cant control what list item is selected by default in the AddOn, that is just normal XBMC list behavior
Regarding the 2nd one, Im not sure as well. It seems that Recordings playback area is kind of just the "Video Player" screen of XBMC and im not sure whether there is metadata support for these recording files. If the recording is completed, we do write the metadata into the WTV file but as it isnt being scanned into an XBMC library im not sure if XBMC can display the metadata. Another thing to try and look into
Cool, sounds like it's possible with a bit of work then. I love that we have so many more options now even though it's still MCE behind the scenes.
It also wasn't very clear how to quickly setup a new series recording for a show
RE: Feature Requests - scarecrow420 - 2014-02-27
Yeah, XBMC doesnt support series recording so the only option we really have is to popup a custom dialog after you have already selected/confirmed to record, which we then get the series recording settings for if desired
RE: Feature Requests - krustyreturns - 2014-02-27
Scarecrow, another option on the dialog is to just give the new version a different name. I think we can detect if its not there and if so, load the old version.
Another thing we could add to the series dialog is days of week for the recording.
So people are for a re-spin of the record dialog?
RE: Feature Requests - scarecrow420 - 2014-02-28
I am all for including the full set of options on the series recording but it would also be good to be able to specify defaults so you dont always have to fill them out. One thing that caught me out was that it defaults to "Around 8:42pm" in the time field (assuming thats when the episode ran) and due to olympics copverage, stuff shifted around a bit and the series record missed the following week's episode. Setting it to "Anytime" resolved it the following week but I think "Anytime" should actually be the default rather than the timeslot. Ideally there would be a way for users to specify their own series link defaults incase people had different requirements. Personally i would want them as broad as possible... any channel, anytime, new and rerun, etc... would rather snag an extra recording rather than miss one.
I think it would also be cool to think about having an automatic series recording option so we dont have to pop up the dialog at all. For example when this mode was set, when a recording request is received and we know it is a show that is part of a series (do we know this?) then we could automatically set it up for series record, with the default series options. Or maybe like on the 2nd press of Record button, make it a series recording (rather than extend the duration). Does that work on EPG scheduled recordings (sending multiple Record commands) or only on live recordings... need to investigate
RE: Feature Requests - bluenote - 2014-02-28
Mce (I think) has the ability to set the default settings, maybe we could tap into that?
RE: Feature Requests - krustyreturns - 2014-02-28
Setting the default settings for series recordings is trivial, I actually thought I set the default for 'anytime', but I have faulty default memory. Also if setting these defaults are in wmc (I think they are too) we can easily import them or override them by setting our own defaults in swmc.
My only concern with the a new custom dialog, with lots of settings, is that I don't like navigating through a bunch of settings that I typically don't change before I get to the 'ok' key. But that's down to skin design (if any users reading this have skinning experience who would like to help design this dialog that would be AWESOME).
scarecrow,
We do determine if a program is part of a series when the user requests a timer, that's how we determine whether to put up the series dialog. We could easily make the default to always record the series as an option. I wouldn't enable it, my guess is you won't either once your kid gets a little older
.Let me know if 'record' press works in the epg for gotham, we could do the 'double press' series record easily if it does (assuming xbmc sends us the second press).
RE: Feature Requests - scarecrow420 - 2014-03-01
mine seems to pop up the series record every time i do a record, even for things I wouldnt say are part of a series
also on the flip side ive had shows where setting up a series record on the "premiere" episode fails to record the following week. I think the 1st week premiere episode is somehow not understood to be a series since it actually has "Premiere" in it's name or whatever... I guess this is probably just bad EPG data. Nothing we can do about it, since WMC behaves the exact same way. I guess I could look into some kind of downloadable EPG rather than just using the default OTA one here in Australia
RE: Feature Requests - SoCalXMBC - 2014-03-04
Feature Request:
As a long time user of SageTV, there are many features that I'd love to see come to XBMC through this plugin... however given the architecture, many of them are not possible through the plugin by itself.
One relatively easy win would be on channel selection, detect if a recording is already in progress on that channel and divert to the recording file rather than displaying a tuner not available message. Little things like this go a long way toward usability.
Something far more complicated but also a huge gap is in recording intelligence, and this is where the XBMC architecture makes it hard, but having the ability to record based upon a search phrase rather then directly tied to a known show. For instance if a new show is coming called "Resurrection" but not yet in the EPG, you could schedule the recording to catch the first of the series before you forget about it and miss it. This functionality already exists in WMC so it may just be a matter of hooking into it.
I have a billion more but as a whole you guys have done exactly enough to bring LiveTV to XBMC in a way to make it the top player, so congrats! Without your contribution to Live TV, this platform would be far too lacking.
RE: Feature Requests - scarecrow420 - 2014-03-05
Yeah it's hard to think how we could provide the "search phrase" based recording since everything in XBMC is premised on having hit record on an EPG entry (or while live streaming a channel). I guess it's always possible in the Series Recording dialog we show, to allow that to have a toggle for type of recording being EPG or Phrase, sort of counter intuitive but like you say we dont have many other options without interface/UI support in the XBMC level. We could pre-populate the search phrase with the selected show name which might be helpful for some small percentage of such search phrase recordings (eg if you selected Star Trek Voyager but actually wanted any Star Trek as a search phrase). Anything to avoid typing with the on screen keyboard, as much as possible!
Regarding the using a current recording file rather than live channel, we could potentially do this (divert the client to the in progress recording, time offset to the current point in time). There are a couple of complications, such that we would need to already be remuxing the in progress recording to TS (which is something we have already discussed, having a setting to remux recordings during defined "prime time" period) but what would you expect happens when you reach the end of that scheduled recording? It is not easy for us to direct XBMC to do something else (eg start playing the live TV channel) once it reaches the end of that recording since once we've handed off the recording file to be played by XBMC we don't know when it finishes and can't do anything more until we receive another request from the client, so we would pretty much just stop at the end of the recording.
RE: Feature Requests - krustyreturns - 2014-03-05
Through tinkering around with the wmc dlls I have found how to do 'wish list' type requests. Xbmc may not give us an easy way to implement this, but we could make these requests setable in swmc. It may not have the convenience of sitting in a comfy chair with a remote, but it does give you the ease of a keyboard and mouse.
RE: Feature Requests - bluenote - 2014-03-05
Krusty, excuse my ignorance, but can't you use a simple hierarchical generic interface like some non pvr addons do (for example, sickbeard, sabnzbd). I've always assumed it was xbmc providing the generic layout and the addon simply providing text options but maybe I'm deluded?
RE: Feature Requests - scarecrow420 - 2014-03-05
For want of a better explanation, regular (non pvr) addons have a "screen" that you go to (by going into eg Video -> Addons -> My Addon) and can somewhat control the structure in there and have different commands/menus for the user to interact with etc, but in the case of PVR addons the screens (EPG, Recordings, Timers, LiveTV) and so on are defined by XBMC and it just makes requests the PVR addons using defined messaging calls such as GetRecordings GetChannels GetTimers and so on. We can cause a custom dialog to popup (like the series recording one we use now) when a user does some interaction that causes a command to be sent to the addon (eg recording a show) but in terms of setting up a wish list/search phrase recording and then displaying all of the wishlist recordings that are setup, it is hard to see how/where this could be done. Eg we would have to do something ugly like give dummy timers for them where the search phrase is the showname and the start/end date are some point way in the future (so as not to trigger XBMC showing popups about them starting to record etc) plus there would be no menu command to "Add wishlist timer" so we would need to wait for the user to fully enter the timer details and THEN could popup our dialog to collect the wishlist specific fields. Or as mentioned, we could enhance the current recording dialog to have "record this show only" "record series" and a new item "setup wishlist" which would ignore the show you had hit record on and instead just do the wishlist thing. Not particularly intuitive but it isnt possible for us to have this WMC concept of "wishlist recordings" shown natively in XBMC interface since to XBMC a "timer" must have a start/stop time and things like that
RE: Feature Requests - SoCalXMBC - 2014-03-05
(2014-03-05, 00:05)scarecrow420 Wrote: Regarding the using a current recording file rather than live channel...
If you are already recording something and select it from the channel or timeline, chances are its something you want to see from the beginning anyway. That should simplify the approach rather than offsetting it to current time and having the user rewind.. I can see how once the show is over, the timer has turned off recording and the next show is not time shifted or even active for that matter. I know Windows Media Center handles this gracefully. Perhaps their approach is also exposed in the .dll, to handle just such an occurrence post timed recording? Even if there was no way to do it, just being able to watch a currently recording item from the channel list/EPG is a win even if it stops at the end!
I find XBMC's compartmentalization of LiveTV confusing at best. I understand their motives to decouple from that main logic but I just don't get the implementation. It seems for a pvr plugin to be successful in their model it must also be installed in conjunction with a custom skin, but then the pvr plugin would be making arbitrary decisions about all the other media paths.. and that violates the compartmentalization idea all over again. It seems that a pvr plugin should be responsible for only the livetv/epg skin, within whatever skin is active, inherit the global theme, and be provided some basic RTC callback functions from the core through an api. I hope that was the future strategy for initially decoupling. I was hoping Gotham would provide some initial insight but that doesn't seem to be the case. I am happy with the reduction in CPU - makes playback much smoother.