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Livin
Posting Freak
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my $.02,
There are some great guides avail free on the internet that have gone through several iterations and tweaking over the years... two of the biggest are zap2it.com & TitanTV.com (IMO, the most flexible/useful/robust).
I suggest checking them out as it should give you some ideas.
I'm not an expert but I play one at work.
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well just a few thoughts... A skin like Aeon could have the now playing video full screen behind the Aeon Glass. The episode info could exist in the diffused area across the bottom. The epg could fit into the existing glass panel with controls across the top matching the Aeon theme. Some other skins might prefer to have the now playing window on the lower left in a small window with episode info right below the epg. I could even see making the epg nice and big to fill most of the screen then if you hover on an item you get the episode info instead of having it showing at all times. Are these the kind of ideas you are looking for from skinners? I'm sure there are other skinners out there willing to throw some creative horsepower at the layout.
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The layout will always be the skinners territory, and so I don't really mean to get into that... I'd rather hear if people want all the extraneous crap I included in my mockup. How sophisticated do people want their skins to look, all bells and whistles; minimalist; somewhere in between?
My third mock up tried to cover all bases, and so its cluttered as a side effect. I was trying to think of all the likely contenders for inclusion in an EPG. I've used some truly awful EPGs in my life, and so the idea is to try and do something worthwhile this time. Striking the balance between having a sophisticated EPG that makes remote management of your PVR app all but unnecessary and getting something solid and simple to use seems pretty crucial.
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Nuka1195
Skilled Python Coder
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The more info you provide, the more options skinners have.
If you provide this information by using properties, they can choose to use it or not.
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hi nuka1195.
That's the plan as of now, I hadn't noticed the whole SetProperty method until you mentioned it.
So each programme will be contained in a CFileItem, with the PVR specific stuff set as properties. Skinners can then choose whether or not to include the description property for the current selected programme in their layout.
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Don't want to make anyone mad, but I think the EPG provided by the xbmcmythtv script is pretty good. If I could use it to select/play livetv, it would pretty much meet my needs.
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Well... since Rand was making a comparison to AEON (a fine skin) and the title of thread references the EPG, I thought the developers might want to take a look at the EPG in xbmcmythtv as a starting point or an example. In the future if you have a problem with a post, you might try a PM rather than cluttering up the thread. Cheers.
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I've been looking forward to finding out how the MythTV integration with XBMC will go. I found this so here's my $0.02 for the EPG.
I'm a big fan of user stories - I have a personal dislike of feature lists because they don't have enough context and you can't tell if the feature will actually help you do something useful. These coarse user stories are based on how I currently use the EPG in the native MythTV client on the MythTV backend server and through the the old xbmcmythtv Python script which is now more or less dead with the new myth:// protocol support.
As a user within the EPG:
I want to find out what shows are on now on so I can choose which one to watch right now. Close integration with Live TV would be great. Perhaps Live TV goes straight to EPG at the current time?
I want to find a program in the EPG so I can schedule it to record (with all of the options, ie. once only, once every week, every week in this timeslot etc.) Please don't only allow me to scroll across the screen half an hour at a time - sometimes I just want to scroll quickly through to Thursday (from Monday) to schedule the new Lost series - I don't want to scroll past whole nights of informercials. As an aside, MythTV has an awesome interface for finding a program if you know it's name. You should probably have a look at that and see if that is in scope for what is being proposed for this PVR frontend stuff in XBMC. I would have thought so as that's really the only other part of the MythTV interface we use, but who knows...
I want to see which programs are scheduled to record and which ones can't be because there is a conflict (possibly because there are not enough tuners available) so I can make sure a show is going to record (lest the WAF factor decrease) and to potentially override which show doesn't get recorded in the case of conflicts.
Below are some of the irritating things from other EPG implementations:
Trying to show too much at once. I really don't care too much about seeing the synopsis of the show directly on the screen. If I care I'll drill down somehow. Use that real estate to show the first order information that really matters - channels, programs and statuses of programs.
Not formatting dates and or times usefully. This is a pet peeve of mine. Most people know that Lost is on Thursday night at 8:30. Yet the EPG and other areas showing when it is on or will record never show the day of the week, just the date. Please consider using the day of the week in the EPG dates and remove all the other repeated stuff, i.e. show "Sat 16" and "Sun 17" instead of "13/06/2008" and "14/06/2008". I know it's 2008 and I can probably guess it's June because the EPG only ever holds 8 days of data (here in New Zealand at any rate). As a bonus it takes up less space and you don't have to worry about those of us who prefer dd/MM/yyyy rather than MM/dd/yyyy.
Below are some of the great things from other EPG implementations:
Icons for the channel. These are great and quick visual cues that work well when finding the right row in the EPG.
Fast!. The MythTV EPG is really fast to load, whereas the xbmcmythtv one could take up to 10 seconds to load. I stopped using the xbmcmythtv one because of that.
That's pretty much it for me at the moment. I don't really care about things like color coding for categories of TV show (eg. sports, cartoons) because the EPG here in New Zealand is very sparse on information like that.
Cheers,
David