Some more ideas for the next version(s)

[Schnurps]

Hi,

last days i played a lot with vomp and thought about possible improvements.
Here are my results for your further discussion:


New features:
1. programme-reminders
Chris mentioned this in "The Plan". Would be really interesting, if this worked automatically. So I put some Search-Strings like "Robbie Williams" or so and get a message if there is a new show with him on any channel.

2. protected recordings
Was discussed here: http://www.loggytronic.com/forum/index.php?topic=113.0.
Would be nice to have per user- or per mediamvp protected recordings/folders/timers, that can only be seen from a specific user or mediamvp (MAC-address).

3. Folders for new recordings
A possibility to select an existing folder (and/or add a new folder) when adding a new timer.
(E.g. i would like to order my recordings like "username/movies/moviename" or (to carry that to the extremes) "user/series/seriesname/season/episodename")

4. Register-View: Options
What do you think about making registers at the options-page? So you won't have to leave the options-menue any more to change the sub-category.

5. Register-View: Channels
Just an idea: Registers in the Channels list. I have some marks in my channels.conf, esp. for music-channels, sport-channels, news-channels etc.
Perhaps you could add registers on the top of the channels-page: [All] [Music] [Sports] [News] (depending on the individual channels.conf).
In my optinion this would make the selection of a channel much quicker. (By the way: What's about a small channel-selection-onscreen-field?)

6. Move/Rename Recordings
Possibility to Rename and/or move a recording or directory

7. Call monitor
I have a isdn-card in my vdr. would be nice to get a little info-box about incoming calls on my mediamvp [possibly only for one specific number/msn -- possibility to automatically pause time-shifted livetv]


8. FileBrowser/Viewer for Photos
9. FileBrowser/Viewer for Mpeg-Files
10. FileBrowser/Viewer for DVDs
11. FileBrowser/Viewer for MP3s/Audio-Files
I know that this is very low priority for Chris, but we could keep this in mind for future ;-)


Bugs/improving existing functionality

1. Backward-Scan in Recordings
Mentioned in "The Plan"

2.Ordering in Recordings
Anything's no more working correcty here (at least with VDR 1.2.6):
Seems that vomp orders the recordings by name (asc) and the folders by date. In my opinion this should work the other way round:
folders by name, recordings by date.

3. Direct Channel-selection while onscreen-display is shown
Is there a possibility to let vomp accept the numbers (for switching to another channel) while the onscreen now&next-box is shown?
When I quickly switch between some channels i always have to press "ok" first.

4. No sound in LiveTV
With the new Version (0.2.2) i have sometimes no sound after selecting a new channel (esp. when i directly change it by chan+/-). Cannot remember to hava had this with Vomp 0.1.2.


Thanks again to Chris for this great piece of software! :-)

greetz
Schnurps

[muellerph]

Just want to add my priorities:

Out of the list of Schnurps:
1. (but the search string is not needed atm)
3.
6.
All the others points I find useful as well, but not that needed at the moment.

As my wife is bugging me on a special one: Photos are very high on the priority of my wife.

[Armin]

Photos are also on a high prio of my whole family.   

[Chris]

Apologies for the outage in service folks... The next version will be along at some point when it works, and you might even like it...

[kdeiss]

In my opinion the most important thing would be something like the prefermenu plugin ......

and of course (my greatest wish since begin of monitoring this project) live osd from vdr. Just a telnet client (using vdrs control plugin)  would help in many situations!

thanks

klaus

[Schnurps]

prefermenu -> i don't use my vdr directly, could you please describe what this plugin does? :-)

Schnurps

[kdeiss]

The prefermenu allows you to make a collection of perfered channels. For example, if I today want to view channel TeleXY_ON_CHANNEL_465 if have to remember that it is on number 465, and then select it from the big list by pressing the down button again and again, bit uggly. In the prefermenu you only will see your prefered channels (manually selected before...) .

Even better would be mechanism comparable with the Bouqet windows you find in the dbox2. The channels are divided on 10 ore more screens. In the dbox2 you can select this screens with the left/right button.

klaus

[Schnurps]

Even better would be mechanism comparable with the Bouqet windows you find in the dbox2. The channels are divided on 10 ore more screens. In the dbox2 you can select this screens with the left/right button.

Is this comparable with my idea here:

5. Register-View: Channels
Just an idea: Registers in the Channels list. I have some marks in my channels.conf, esp. for music-channels, sport-channels, news-channels etc.
Perhaps you could add registers on the top of the channels-page: [All] [Music] [Sports] [News] (depending on the individual channels.conf).
In my optinion this would make the selection of a channel much quicker. (By the way: What's about a small channel-selection-onscreen-field?)

Schnurps

[kdeiss]

@schnurps
I think yes, and this could be implemented  (in my opinion) more easy. But let's look what the devel team thinks abouts this proposals.......

klaus

[Schnurps]

*bump* the updated list (now that Chris is back!) :-)

[dingo35]

Under the "Bugs" section I am missing the already reported bug:

When after midnight, a timer is created (through the EPG menu) on a program that has already started before midnight, the timer is created 24 hours too late....

[Uatschitchun]

Oh pls ... consider mp3-playback as it is the only reason for me staying at "old" mediamvp-plugin ... 

Lg
Roman

[Bandit2001]

8. FileBrowser/Viewer for Photos

imho vomp would be perfect if this feature is improved.  (and the WAF would be much better!)

if i could help doing this, please mail me.

[muellerph]

Hello Chris,

thinking about how to include viewing photos, the question comes up how you would like to implement such a functionality (in case you would do it)?

As JPEGs can be huge (in comparision to the RAM size of the MVP), I assume that an "easy" opening of files via e.g. NFS or SMB may at the end crash the MVP. Also we would need to implement support for e.g. EXIF as well or other file types like PNG, BMP,.... Not thinking about how to provide fast thumbnail overviews.

On the other hand we have a server who could scale the photos to the PAL/NTSC size already before offering them through the network, which would be faster as network bandwith is one of the time consuming factors anyway. Also the server could store the thumbnails or the scaled photos in a cache.

The way how VDR plugin itself is doing it is somehow not feasable. VDR generates a video out of the photos. I assume this is only done because normal FF cards cannot display JPEGs. I don't think this makes much sense at all with a MVP as we could use the photos directly.

So I searched for a photo server who could do following things:
- Scale the photos to PAL/NTSC size
- Use EXIF information where possible
- Can provides thumbnails
- Can use BMPs, PNG, ...

At least I didn't find any special one, beside of all the UPNP servers. I didn't test the ones I found in order to see if they provide the above functionality (i.e. scaling to NTSC/PAL before offering the files).

The functionality described of the servers normally doesn't focus on the functionality of photos. At least in the documentation for the UPNP standard, all the needed functionality is included.

But in case you would go such a way, it would end up that we have a working implementation of UPNP which is bound to djmount, FUSE and therefore to the newer kernel version (2.4.31) - as MVPMC is doing it as well.

Or you would build a VDR plugin with somehow a "proprietary" implementation of UPNP functionality for photos.

Is this also your understanding and/or which way you would like to implement it?