Mailing List Archive: MythTV: Dev

Browsing across multiple tuners

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ron at ronfrazier

Jan 2, 2008, 8:32 AM

Post #1 of 10 (1111 views)
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Browsing across multiple tuners

Yes, I'm aware of Ticket #978 and the "wontfix" status. Yes I'm aware
of the "use the EPG" response...that works for me, but not for all
people. I've seen this feature requested enough, and my wife would
definitely be happier with it.

I've already coded up a patch that does the following:

- Checks the DB for a "BrowseAllTuners" parameter...if set to 0 (or if
not specified), browsing behaves exactly as it does now.
- Handles browsing: by direction, by favorites, and by direct numeric entry
- Adds the following extra infoMap attributes for the browse_info OSD:
tuner = "Current Tuner", "Tuner 3", or empty if no tuner is
available for that channel
notuner = "No Tuners Available", or empty if a tuner is
available for that channel

I could have combined these 2 together, but I thought some people
might only want to show the status one way or the other, or might want
to put them in 2 separate textareas that overlay each other, so
%TUNER% could be white and %NOTUNER% could be red. ***I have a
question about this below***

If you ignore the "No Tuners Available" message and try to change to
another tuner anyway, that gets handled by the existing code (the same
code that displays the dialog box if you directly enter the channel
number for an unavailable tuner).

The patch currently does NOT:
- set the "tuner" attribute for the program_info OSD. Is this necessary?
- support channel up/down across tuners (ie: when persistent browsing
is off). Is this necessary?
- have an option in the setup gui to enable this (thats not a part of
the mythtv code I've explored yet).

What other features would need to be considered for this to be
accepted as a patch? The discussion from ticket #978 is a bit
outdated, as I believe that was before LiveTV was completely
overhauled. At the moment I can't really see any other issues that
don't already exist when directly typing in the channel number for a
channel on another tuner.

***Question about the OSD***
What I wanted to do was be able to put the title in red if the program
wasn't available on a tuner. I thought I'd try to do this by
overlaying 2 textarea boxes with the title: one in white and one in
red. I then added another notunerflag attribute that was an empty
string if there was a tuner available, or a single space (so it would
appear invisible). I then added %NOTUNERFLAG|||% before each of the
%TITLE% variables, and embedded a few newline chars in the appropriate
spot to try to force one of the two outside of it's clipping rect (so
in effect, only the appropriate one would be visible). The problem is
that it left ellipses ( . . . ) in the display. Is there a way to
prevent this, or even a more elegant solution to the matter ( other
than modifying OSDTypeText to support something like a fcnfont )?

--
Ron
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danielk at cuymedia

Jan 3, 2008, 7:25 AM

Post #2 of 10 (1056 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 11:32 -0500, Ronald Frazier wrote:
> Yes, I'm aware of Ticket #978 and the "wontfix" status. Yes I'm aware
> of the "use the EPG" response...that works for me, but not for all
> people. I've seen this feature requested enough, and my wife would
> definitely be happier with it.
<snip>
> What other features would need to be considered for this to be
> accepted as a patch? The discussion from ticket #978 is a bit
> outdated, as I believe that was before LiveTV was completely
> overhauled. At the moment I can't really see any other issues that
> don't already exist when directly typing in the channel number for a
> channel on another tuner.

Does it work with the changes in the multirec branch? I agree
that the comments in #978 are outdated with the current LiveTV
implementation.

> ***Question about the OSD***
> What I wanted to do was be able to put the title in red if the program
> wasn't available on a tuner. I thought I'd try to do this by
> overlaying 2 textarea boxes with the title: one in white and one in
> red. I then added another notunerflag attribute that was an empty
> string if there was a tuner available, or a single space (so it would
> appear invisible). I then added %NOTUNERFLAG|||% before each of the
> %TITLE% variables, and embedded a few newline chars in the appropriate
> spot to try to force one of the two outside of it's clipping rect (so
> in effect, only the appropriate one would be visible). The problem is
> that it left ellipses ( . . . ) in the display. Is there a way to
> prevent this, or even a more elegant solution to the matter ( other
> than modifying OSDTypeText to support something like a fcnfont )?

Probably modifying OSDTypeText to support colors would be the best
option. We are planning on replacing the OSD stuff with MythUI
widgets but this is far enough in the future that improving
OSDTypeText is still valuable.

-- Daniel

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ron at ronfrazier

Jan 3, 2008, 7:53 AM

Post #3 of 10 (1062 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

> Does it work with the changes in the multirec branch?

I haven't used the multirec branch. My only HD tuner is a HD Homerun,
and from what I've read on the topic, I'm under the impression that
the HD Homerun isn't supported by the multirec branch. Am I correct?

> Probably modifying OSDTypeText to support colors would be the best
> option. We are planning on replacing the OSD stuff with MythUI
> widgets but this is far enough in the future that improving
> OSDTypeText is still valuable.

Then I guess I'll have to look into that. Thanks

-
Ron
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danielk at cuymedia

Jan 3, 2008, 8:39 AM

Post #4 of 10 (1061 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 10:53 -0500, Ronald Frazier wrote:
> > Does it work with the changes in the multirec branch?
>
> I haven't used the multirec branch. My only HD tuner is a HD Homerun,
> and from what I've read on the topic, I'm under the impression that
> the HD Homerun isn't supported by the multirec branch. Am I correct?

Yes, for now mutlirec is only for DVB recorders. But the way that
the channel changing and browsing is done has changed in the branch.

-- Daniel

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ron at ronfrazier

Jan 3, 2008, 11:51 AM

Post #5 of 10 (1057 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

I download the multirec branch, applied my patch and built it. Only 1
thing needed to change...a function in channelutil.cpp was modified to
require a 4th parameter. After adding that param to the call, it built
fine and appeared to run without any problem. The rest of my changes
were in sections that weren't modified in the multirec branch.

Of course, it doesn't take advantage of the multirec changes. It would
tell you a channel was unavailable even if you could share the
multiplex with a recording. Not sure if sharing a multiplex between a
recording and live tv would be desirable, but obviously I couldn't
test it if I wanted to.

--
Ron
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steve.p.daniels at googlemail

Jan 3, 2008, 11:56 AM

Post #6 of 10 (1049 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

On 03/01/2008, Ronald Frazier <ron [at] ronfrazier> wrote:

> Of course, it doesn't take advantage of the multirec changes. It would
> tell you a channel was unavailable even if you could share the
> multiplex with a recording. Not sure if sharing a multiplex between a
> recording and live tv would be desirable, but obviously I couldn't
> test it if I wanted to.

Oooh, very desirable..!

>
> --
> Ron

Steve
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ron at ronfrazier

Jan 3, 2008, 12:40 PM

Post #7 of 10 (1054 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

> Oooh, very desirable..!

I'm not sure why I asked, as I was certain that would be the answer :-)

If I could test it, I'd have no problem adding support for multirec
features. Anyone know if there are any plans by anyone to expand
multirec to include things like the HD Homerun (and other non-DVB
cards) ? My understanding is that the HDHR is capable of handling the
necessary pid filter (not sure about the other cards).

--
Ron
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danielk at cuymedia

Jan 3, 2008, 3:19 PM

Post #8 of 10 (1049 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 15:40 -0500, Ronald Frazier wrote:
> > Oooh, very desirable..!
>
> I'm not sure why I asked, as I was certain that would be the answer :-)
>
> If I could test it, I'd have no problem adding support for multirec
> features. Anyone know if there are any plans by anyone to expand
> multirec to include things like the HD Homerun (and other non-DVB
> cards) ? My understanding is that the HDHR is capable of handling the
> necessary pid filter (not sure about the other cards).

Someday. The HDHomeRun is more than capable of supporting multirec.

-- Daniel

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jakeisawake at gmail

Jan 3, 2008, 9:22 PM

Post #9 of 10 (1049 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

> Someday. The HDHomeRun is more than capable of supporting multirec.
>
> -- Daniel
>

i had planned to try. got my hdhomerun and one tuner was defective
and had to rma it but when i get it back i definitely plan to at least
look into adding support for it in the multirec branch.
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ron at ronfrazier

Jan 22, 2008, 6:23 PM

Post #10 of 10 (915 views)
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Re: Browsing across multiple tuners [In reply to]

Just as a followup, I've submitted a patch for browsing across tuners
in ticket #4501.

As part of the patch, I went ahead an upgraded the OSDTypeText class
to support a fcnfont as discussed earlier. I've tried to implement
this in the most general way possible to provide the most flexibility.
When used in the textarea, the fcnfont tag requires an additional
"group" attribute. This allows you to implement multiple groups of
functions without having one group walk all over the other.

The group that I implemented was called "tuner" and the possible
values for "function" are "current", "available", and "unavailable".
The 3rd patch in the ticket demonstrates how to use this to make the
program title change color depending on which tuner will be used:
green if the show is on the current tuner, yellow if on another tuner,
and red if there are no tuners available for that program.

I was planning to port this functionality over to the rest of the gui
(via the UITextType class). I could see it being useful in a number of
places, especially for things like status messages and conflict
alerts. For example, right now, the conflict_info container (which
displays the "No Conflicts" or "Confict Today" message) kind of hacks
around it by having 2 separate textareas in the same location to
handle different colors. This would make things like that cleaner and
avoid having to special case it in the code.

Before I spent any time applying the changes to the rest of the gui, I
was curious if anybody had any feedback on the way I implemented this.
Does this look useful enough and functional enough as is? Also, if you
have any feedback on the primary feature of this patch (browsing
across tuners), that would be welcome also?

--
Ron
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