Hi,
Great work so far!
Been watching this project with great interest and while I have no idea about the coding behind it I thought I'd mention some things you may wish to consider along the way. Even if they can be included much later on after GSOC.
This post probably doesn't belong in a skinning forum though the content would affect skin development. Apologies if ti's the wrong place to post it
One thing I find with XBMC is that it's just better than every other HTPC app in terms of it's intuitive behavior.
Most guide implementations are not intuitive and the vast majority of them follow a similar 24hr grid theme. It's a difficult thing to do well but it would be awesome if XBMC could do it better.
I've been thinking about viewing habits (mine in particular), but I would think they are relatively common.
The vast majority of the time I'm only interested in seeing what is on via the guide during prime time. say 7pm -> midnight. For anything else I would use search functions to find it as I'm not going to scroll through 24 hours of programming every day looking for a program. This is particularly relevant when I'm looking for content I might like to record for later viewing.
Would it be possible to code for customised easily switchable "views" of the guide. Even if only used for scheduling recordings. So you could for instance have channels listed across the x axis and display all programming between 7pm->midnight (user definable) down the y axis with say the "skip" right function on the remote jumping to the next "primetime" day. That way the end user could very quickly search through the entire weeks primetime viewing with only 7 presses of the remote? Only titles should be displayed but a full synopsis should be shown below as any individual title is highlighted.
It'd also be great if I were able to add exclusions to my guide. i.e. Instead of marking series I want to record I'd also like to mark series that I don't want the guide to show at all. So I could exclude any reference to reality TV shows, the news, etc etc.. With enough exclusions all that should be left is anything that is new or that I am interested in. It should be able to exclude entire categories like "Chick Flicks!"
It's a reverse way of viewing the data but could be very powerful when set up correctly as the guide displayed on screen could potentially not have data for days, allowing that space to be reclaimed and I might get a list of days worth of shows I'm interested in all on one screen simultaneously. Maybe you could call it a "favorites" view allowing options to mark favorite shows, exclude disliked shows and display everything else as uncategorised until tagged as a favorite or excluded. It would take some work to set up but would make browsing for new and interesting content much much faster.
Could it work? Is it viable for an end user... I dunno. Just trying to think up some new innovative ideas to give XBMC the edge
Having used many guide implementations I feel there has to be better ways of displaying the data than the 24 hour grid method they all adhere to.
Just some ideas at any rate. Keep up the great work, I'm very appreciative of what you're trying to achieve and the XBMC project as a whole!
Cheers,
Arkay.
