XBMC 12 (Frodo) - So What's The Plan?

Jimmer, yes from my experience when it comes to pvr, different skins are mostly just different colors and font, everything is pretty much the same. And that makes me think that xbmc-pvr really is a limited set of available gui options, but I don't know. It's just how it seems. Like from previous htpc software I've had experience with when you add a plugin, the plugin supply the functionality, the gui, and often the skin. For xbmc it seems like you have one plugin developer, and then a skin maker has to build that plugin functionality into the skin ? So you can't just find a cool plugin and install it, you have to wait for a skin maker to add it, or do it yourself ?

When I talk about gui, I say that in a broad way, not just skin, but functionality. So stuff like add a recording from EPG, you click on it, and you have the option "switch" is really just a view channel button, you have "timer" that ask you if you want to record it, and you have "ok" button that simply go back to prev view. Now the OK button doesn't make sense, like I've hinted to earlier we already have 2 keybinds for back, why another button aswell

Now what I'd like is when I click "timer" I would like some more options, like pre/past recording, recording priority, series recording (with even more rules) etc... I'd like a option to add reminder to a show, so before the show starts it reminds me if I'm wathcing something else. Are you saying stuff like this is a limitation of the skin, not xbmc-pvr development ? You know the stuff that you can do with your remote, not much has happened there yet, I don't know xbmc that good yet, so I don't know if this is skin issue or xbmc development issue.

(2012-05-08 14:41)Jimmer Wrote:  .... as far as I can see the majority of the PVR work is being done under the hood - and this is right - leave the whizz-bang interface stuff for skinners to sort out down the line......

Totally agree! I would rather a completely stable build.

Kra77, we know about some GUI flaws in the PVR branch, but nobody is currently willing to touch it until the underlying codebase is not stable. As long as PVR is not in mainline, things/APIs are still subject to change (IIRC dushmanic needs to do another refactoring which most likely will break PVR entirely for some time). So please be patient.

"Patience is a virtue, have it if you can.
Seldom found in woman,
Never in a man"

I'm a man damnit

Actually I think stability is quite nice, and stuff is working, I just want more stuff I started my xbmc-pvr adventure in 2010, but didn't make the final move until this year.

Timeshifting is what I miss the most, everything else I can live with, although there is lots of stuff I'd like added.

I'm also discussing over on the FTR forum like I said there, conflict managment has improvement potential, I would love for the backend and frontend to communicate when there is a conflict and give me a choice how to solve it. Like when you are watching a show, and a schedule recording is starting, currently it will just cut live-tv and start recording, the best WAF would be a popup in xbmc that asks me what to do, give me options like a)continue wathcing b) start recording c) start recording when I stop live etc...

There are lots of cool things you can do, problem is when there are 2 seperate developers (actually 3 here, xbmc,plugin and backend), you have to make them all think it's a good idea to make

How to become best, look at your competition, take their best ideas and improve them.

we all miss timeshift, but until the planned refactoring of dushmaniac is not finished, nobody is touching it. And believe me - I'm nagging dushmaniac quite often with timeshift because I really really want to get rid of MediaPortal and do a final switch to a XBMC only HTPC

From Red_F (FTR plugin) "right now I'm working at getting true timeshift working (meaning you could pause Live-TV, re-wind, fast-forward)."

(2012-05-10 11:48)KRA77 Wrote:  From Red_F (FTR plugin) "right now I'm working at getting true timeshift working (meaning you could pause Live-TV, re-wind, fast-forward)."

Pretty sure Fred is also waiting on the impending refactoring. Da-anda is right, it would be foolish to get too deep in to some of these requests (such as timeshifting, which is pretty major) knowing that the PVR code is being refactored.

I'm looking forward to timeshifting too, believe me. I already gave up MePo and just put up with the lack of it, and help test/debug where I can.

But again, the question is, how much of the timeshifting is really handled by XBMC? The backend is what implements the live buffer. It dumps a transport stream to disk and allows seek functions on it as if it were a normal video file. All XBMC really needs to do is send the commands Pause/FF/Rew to the backend. Last night, I updated to the latest version of TVHeadend. I was in the web interface and I hit "Play" by one of the channels. It opened the video stream in VLC. I paused it.... waited. Hit play, it played.... I hit rewind, it rewound. I'm just curious as to what XBMC needs to do that is so much different.

I'm seriously not trying to sound like a troll here. I stress that I'm sure there's something I'm missing, I would just like to know what it is.

(2012-05-11 05:35)nobleach Wrote:  But again, the question is, how much of the timeshifting is really handled by XBMC? The backend is what implements the live buffer. It dumps a transport stream to disk and allows seek functions on it as if it were a normal video file. All XBMC really needs to do is send the commands Pause/FF/Rew to the backend. Last night, I updated to the latest version of TVHeadend. I was in the web interface and I hit "Play" by one of the channels. It opened the video stream in VLC. I paused it.... waited. Hit play, it played.... I hit rewind, it rewound. I'm just curious as to what XBMC needs to do that is so much different.

I'm seriously not trying to sound like a troll here. I stress that I'm sure there's something I'm missing, I would just like to know what it is.

I needs something that doesn't just work in tvheadend and works on about 5 different back ends across 3 different OS's

Well, Marcel and Fred develops the Mepo/FTR plugin, Marcel sits on previous timeshifting code that was removed from source. Both Mepo and FTR(argus) does timeshifting on the backend side, so it's not like they have to implement timeshifting in xbmc, just the option to pause and seek forward/back in the available TS. I think this is good news for Mepo/FTR users, but might not help users of such backends that doesn't have timeshifting ? Those needs full timeshifting on xbmc frontend and I don't think that is what they are working on, and as I've said I really don't think xbmc-dev should "waste time" on that, it's a backend job.

So you might say, they are not working on timeshifting pr say, they are just working on implementing seeking, wich ultimatly will give timeshifting on those backends. But still what I believe they are doing, we'd only know if they responded themself.