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Unified PVR frontend (DVR/HTPC client GUI with EPG) and Addons API for PVR backends?
#16
I don't think xbmc ever should strive for doing the jobs of a pvr, it should be a frontend nothing else. that said adding v4l input support shouldn't hinder that.

alcoheca, sure this is something that could be gsoc'ed, and for the interaction against backends and player integration, i'd be able to help out. but i'm not too keen on being the official mentor for it, and am i not very well suited for the gui parts anyway.
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#17
I'm happy to mentor that nasty GUI stuff, and I'm sure between us all we can get something reasonable working.

I'm agreed with elupus in that XBMC should concentrate on the frontend only.
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#18
Ok I have been thinking about how such a thing would fit into xbmc lately and this is my thoughts. Not sure anything about the programming side so it may not be practical but I think TV would need to be seperated from videos as that section would become too large.

TV
-----Live TV
---------------EPG
---------------Channels
-----Recorded/Downloaded Shows (Perhaps Seperate)
-----Schedule
---------------Upcoming Recordings
---------------Conflicts
Movies
Music
Pictures
Programs


Is this in line with other peoples thoughts?
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#19
It's great to see the number of responses to this thread, and with the talk of multiple projects for this feature I feel a whole lot of progress could be made over the next few months. TV heaven beckons (heaven = no real estate investment reality programmes & no life invading advertisements).

@Gamester17 I've signed up for integrating libnemesi into dvdplayer, and have started work. Assuming no natural disasters occur, I will make the SoC deadline.

@elupus & jmarshall : Producing a cross platform/application frontend certainly seems more pertinent to me. I'm very happy to hear of developers with this in mind. Big Grin

@Nick8888 I'm of the opinion that a separate TV section would be the most logical route to take too. For the sake of completeness you could always have "TV Recordings" available as a built in source in the videos section.

Thinking aloud while looking at your diagram I see some improvements that could be made. Because of the way many people use televisions a more immediate link to the TV guide and live TV might appease many non-geeks like ourselves. The option to flick at will and pull up the EPG easily would suit many people (excepting myself).

I think the schedule conflicts could be integrated into the EPG for simplicity.

I'm not so keen on merging the PVR facilities with ripped TV series, this might blur the distinction between the two. What could be handy is automatic inclusion in the video library, once you hit "series record" in the EPG/OSD.

I have a few other ideas on the GUI aspects and so perhaps it's a good idea to create a wiki page as a resource site for this sort of discussion.
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#20
alcoheca Wrote:I have a few other ideas on the GUI aspects and so perhaps it's a good idea to create a wiki page as a resource site for this sort of discussion.
Good idea, here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=GSoC_Project..._back-ends
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#21
alcoheca Wrote:Because of the way many people use televisions a more immediate link to the TV guide and live TV might appease many non-geeks like ourselves. The option to flick at will and pull up the EPG easily would suit many people (excepting myself).

Adding support to the keymap for this woud also be apprieciated. For those with MCE remote and I for one always used "Recorded TV" to bring me directly there with a flick of a button, same with EPG and LiveTV. But that is the least of the work ahead Smile
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"Well Im gonna download the code and look at it a bit but I'm certainly not a really good C/C++ programer but I'd help as much as I can, I mostly write in C#."
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#22
Topfs2 Wrote:Adding support to the keymap for this woud also be apprieciated. For those with MCE remote and I for one always used "Recorded TV" to bring me directly there with a flick of a button, same with EPG and LiveTV. But that is the least of the work ahead Smile


I'm sure that this will be incorporated into the list of outcomes for the feature suggestion.

(while on the subject I shall write one up, thanks to Gamester17)
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#23
I've added some ideas to the wiki
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#24
Should the epg not come from the pvr backend? It seems like it would be for more efficient as my pvr grabs live epg data straight from the dish network satellites.
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#25
nate12o6 Wrote:Should the epg not come from the pvr backend? It seems like it would be for more efficient as my pvr grabs live epg data straight from the dish network satellites.
The EPG is the TV-Guide GUI so that should be in XBMC as part of the frontend, so no, but what could come from the backend TV-server is the XMLTV listings.xml (which the GUI will parse and display on the screen as programs and times).

But XMLTV listings.xml could also be downloaded from the internet. So best is just to aim for a EPG which can parse the XMLTV format and display it as a TV-Guide, then the matter of getting the listings.xml files is really separate project as it could be done in several ways (for now we should probably just use python, then later it might be good idea to evaluate a new method like for example extending XBMC's scraper engine, but that is a different discussion that should be discussed in a separate thread).
http://xmltv.org/wiki/
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#26
nate12o6 Wrote:Should the epg not come from the pvr backend? It seems like it would be for more efficient as my pvr grabs live epg data straight from the dish network satellites.

Yes freeview in the UK uses EIT aswell which means no XMLTV Smile which i loathe anyway... only a 7 day EPG but i dont care whats on next century Laugh
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#27
well xmltv as a base is still fine. if we use EIT it's still up to the backend to grab the data as we can't lie and watch mpeg stream all the time. so it must store it in some other format.

i have no problem in adding xmltv output support to our cmyth based filesystem (ie open a special url and you get a xmltv file), even if mythtv stores recordings differently in a db.
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#28
C-Quel Wrote:Yes freeview in the UK uses EIT aswell which means no XMLTV Smile which i loathe anyway... only a 7 day EPG but i dont care whats on next century Laugh

I'm not sure how it is these days, but the UK EIT EPG used to be pretty poor, with no genre information, detailed description etc. And I'm not sure 7 days ahead is such a great service.

I always found the RadioTimes data to be much more suitable, but isn't this all irrelevant anyway, as each individual module could deal with EPG in a different way? EIT is favourable because then we can get updates to program start times etc. This would have to be be dealt with by the PVR app, updating our EPG minute by minute.

By the time the data gets to the GUI, which we're talking about here, it will probably already be in binary format, objects based on a class that we create. (Passed internally from module to frontend.)
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#29
Although eit over the air is not as extensive as with Schedules Direct, it is free. Smile

And yes overtheair in UK now has almost everything you need info wise... its very populated. As i said the 7 day EPG is the weakest point.
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#30
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elupus Wrote:i have no problem in adding xmltv output support to our cmyth based filesystem (ie open a special url and you get a xmltv file), even if mythtv stores recordings differently in a db.
Sounds like a good idea to get a unified solution, then any other clients can do the same. So even if each each individual client module deals with the EPG data differently internally they will in the end always present a XMLTV listings.xml files to XBMC frontend which it in turn can use in its TV-Guide GUI.
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