[migueld]

The ATV doesn't have a select, menu and back. I'm not sure how its done today, but I would think you'd have to make the "menu" button go back and have the select button always bring up the menu and force you to go through the extra step.

Or am I missing how the "back" is generated?

Yea currently the menu button in apple remote behaves as follows:

Menu: back
Menu hold: context menu

[jmarshall]

@migueld: While I basically agree with you, there are circumstances where doing something other than "play" by defaultmay be more useful for a particular scenario.

In some situations having the "Enter/Select" button actually give you a choice of which action to perform on an item makes quite a bit of sense. For instance, I've always liked the idea of "Select" on a movie giving you the movie information rather than playing directly. After all, the default action from there could well be play, and it's not as if it slows you down much. Once you have that separate screen, then many of the context items become irrelevant, as you just do them directly in there.

While this works well for videos, it doesn't work so well for music where you don't want to be going constantly through a separate menu. On the other hand, having the default action be "Queue" (as an option, ofcourse) in music gives a simple way to do a jukebox style mode.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[topfs2]

I'd go so far as to say it's a great feature for movies but not so much for TV Shows, so there is a context difference there aswell which is probably a good idea to take into account.

[darkscout]

In some situations having the "Enter/Select" button actually give you a choice of which action to perform on an item makes quite a bit of sense. For instance, I've always liked the idea of "Select" on a movie giving you the movie information rather than playing directly. After all, the default action from there could well be play, and it's not as if it slows you down much. Once you have that separate screen, then many of the context items become irrelevant, as you just do them directly in there.

If I want to open a file on my computer I [double] click it.
If I want information about a file on my computer I Alt-Enter or Apple-I.

So I have a big 'select' button on my remote. When I 'select' a movie it would show info about it. So when you 'select' a folder, should it open it, or give you info on it?

Most of the skins I've tried out have a view in library mode where it does show the info of the movie.

I think "get info" should be a separate button, most universal remotes have something close.

At worst you don't map it and just map contextual menu, from witch you can select all available options (Play, get info, queue, etc).

[jmarshall]

If you either don't map it or map it to context menu, in either case you need to define it somewhere - this is my point: Separate things for "Select" in different sections may make sense, thus there is more than one "context" to define (eg "focused on a video file" versus "focused on a music file" may command different mappings).

The absolute first thing to do before this will take off is to define those contexts. The smaller the set of contexts the better. It may be that we don't feel we need a separate "focused on playable item" context in each view.

The code side or making it work from the UI is the easy bit in comparison.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[migueld]

@migueld: While I basically agree with you, there are circumstances where doing something other than "play" by defaultmay be more useful for a particular scenario.

In some situations having the "Enter/Select" button actually give you a choice of which action to perform on an item makes quite a bit of sense. For instance, I've always liked the idea of "Select" on a movie giving you the movie information rather than playing directly. After all, the default action from there could well be play, and it's not as if it slows you down much. Once you have that separate screen, then many of the context items become irrelevant, as you just do them directly in there..

Yea I agree that would be nice. That's gonna get tricky though. There are some skins where the current view already gives movie info, and so going through another info screen/window would be redundant. But there are other views that don't have info; so going through an info screen would be nice. Perhaps a way to solve that would be to let the skin choose the behavior... not sure.

About queue I see what you are saying. Now, having queue as default as an option... you would still need to bring up a context menu if you want to queue an album or playlist. Hmm that's gonna require some thought...

[jmarshall]

Yeah, it's a tricky one when the skin is involved. Currently I guess the skin does dictate some of what happens on navigation - they can make directional movements change screen (MC360) or start playing videos (Aeon) so perhaps allowing the skin to define the action isn't entirely out of the question, though I remain unconvinced that it's really the skinners role to dictate something quite like this.

[Brent212]

In some situations having the "Enter/Select" button actually give you a choice of which action to perform on an item makes quite a bit of sense. For instance, I've always liked the idea of "Select" on a movie giving you the movie information rather than playing directly. After all, the default action from there could well be play, and it's not as if it slows you down much. Once you have that separate screen, then many of the context items become irrelevant, as you just do them directly in there.

While this works well for videos, it doesn't work so well for music where you don't want to be going constantly through a separate menu. On the other hand, having the default action be "Queue" (as an option, ofcourse) in music gives a simple way to do a jukebox style mode.

Completely agree with this. I too would like the "Select" button to bring up movie/tv show info when I press it while a video is highlighted.

I also prefer to always queue music files rather than have them played. I'm not planning on using XBMC for music, mostly because I'm too picky about the music software I use (this is a perfect example), and without that, I definitely can't see using it. At parties, you'd constantly be getting songs interrupted because someone selected a song and didn't know they needed to bring up some context menu and select "add to playlist" or something.

There are some skins where the current view already gives movie info, and so going through another info screen/window would be redundant. But there are other views that don't have info; so going through an info screen would be nice.

But if it were just an option that the user could change, then this wouldn't really matter. If the view that I choose to use has movie info already shown then I'll set the option to play videos when they're selected. If the view I use hides the video info I can set the option to bring up the info when a video's selected.

[spiff]

I also prefer to always queue music files rather than have them played. I'm not planning on using XBMC for music, mostly because I'm too picky about the music software I use (this is a perfect example), and without that, I definitely can't see using it. At parties, you'd constantly be getting songs interrupted because someone selected a song and didn't know they needed to bring up some context menu and select "add to playlist" or something.

which is why we have the randomly named 'party mode' ;P