[Lunatixz]

Can I make some feature requests for problems I've noticed while using it. I know your working on some bugs and some of these sort of fall into Bugs, but want to share my wife's expereience with it and what she complained to me about to make it more friendly.

1. From the EPG, could you allow to jump around by entering a channel number and the EPG will jump to that point. For example, if I have 100 channels, I'm on channel 1, but the channel my wife wants to watch is somewhere between 80-90, from within the EPG, she types in 80, the EPG jumps to that position and allows her to select her channel when she finds which one it is? Our current workaround is go to channel 80 before opening EPG, which works, just not ideal as its an extra step.

2. Better handling of stream errors. I have quite a few channels that are rtmp streams, and on occasions they go down. What happens is PTVL gives me an error that the stream doesn't work and then starts to close the threads and close PTVL. When I open PTVL back up, it is again trying to start the rtmp stream that is down and starts to close again before I'm able to change the channel. Its like an endless loop.

On that note, could someone just tell me where in Settings2.xml is the line that tells what was the last channel watched? Would help me when working around the problem mentioned.

3. Allow changing of channel or even better opening of EPG while a channel is loading. When it takes more the 15 secs for a stream to open it usually means it is down and I would like to just use the EPG to select another channel to watch. This may or may not be possible, but I ran into this problem yesterday. USTVnow had a problem (including through my webbrowser) and it just continuously said working and would never time out. I couldn't get off the channel through PTVL and had to edit the settings2.xml which my wife wouldn't be able to manage.

I simply love this Addon, and will be donating to this project. Once I added my HDHomerun, it took it to the final level for me to cut the cable and my wife is almost in agreement with me if I can keep it as friendly as possible for her to deal with problems when they arise and I'm not around to fix them.

We all want this as wife friendly as possible!! I appreciate the requests, some of which may not be possible because of XBMC limitations...

1. This may be possible without a full rewrite... but no promises.

2. Error handling is always a concern. The code I've implemented is doing an okay job, till I find a better method. If you find a lot of your channels going offline try increasing the channel reset for that channel. Set that specific channel to reset daily. This will trigger a stream check. BTW The setting you are looking for is in setting.xml called "currentchannel".

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Force a Channel Reset Code:

Code:

<setting id="Channel_###_rulecount" value="?" />
<setting id="Channel_###_rule_$_id" value="13" />
<setting id="Channel_###_rule_$_opt_1" value="%" />

### = Channel Number
? = amount of rules you have, if you only had the rename rule then you have "2"
$ = rule number, if this is the second rule you have, then it's "2"
& = how many days till a force reset, "1" is good for stream offline checks.

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3. Currently isn't possible. Once you select something to play PTVL isn't in control anymore XBMC Player is... PTVL won't respond till the player is finished loading. I maybe can force the EPG/Overlay to load, but I believe XBMC won't give focus to PTVL so your keypresses wouldn't register. Making the display useless...

Hope that helps...