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Roberdin · 2007-07-27, 13:51

I think that going straight to full screen TV is a bad idea. The reason being that it will not be obvious to anyone unfamiliar with MediaPortal that there are any other TV watching options. At the moment, you go into My TV, and there are a series of options about the TV Guide, Scheduled Recordings, Recordings, et c. If it goes straight to Live TV ... how will anyone know how to change channels, how to get to the EPG, how to watch recordings, et c. (Not everyone has a remote to make this easier.) Pressing "OK" (or the carriage return key) is non-trivial, who would think to do that unless he knew that there was more functionality and was trying all key combinations?

Maybe a solution is to have the first option within the My TV sub-menu, "Watch live TV now". Or even, keep what we have now, a big old TV preview on one side, and an option that says "Go to full screen TV".

I don't know if this is off topic, but what I think is an important necessity, is to "separate" the business layer of communicating with the TV server and the actual graphics display. What I mean is that if Media Portal is waiting for the TV server to do something (say set up several recordings when you select "Record every time..."), I don't want MediaPortal to hang while this happens (which it does, sometimes for more than 30 seconds). I can only presume that this is because that the UI system runs in the same thread as whatever system handles communicating with the TV server. This also happens to me when I browse in the EPG - it has to fetch the data from the server, and I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs while the display freezes for maybe ten seconds. Instead, the display should "dynamically" update as data become available, like a web page displaying place holders until the images are downloaded.

2007-07-27, 13:51	#12 (permalink)
Roberdin Portal Member Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: London, United Kingdom Posts: 102 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	I think that going straight to full screen TV is a bad idea. The reason being that it will not be obvious to anyone unfamiliar with MediaPortal that there are any other TV watching options. At the moment, you go into My TV, and there are a series of options about the TV Guide, Scheduled Recordings, Recordings, et c. If it goes straight to Live TV ... how will anyone know how to change channels, how to get to the EPG, how to watch recordings, et c. (Not everyone has a remote to make this easier.) Pressing "OK" (or the carriage return key) is non-trivial, who would think to do that unless he knew that there was more functionality and was trying all key combinations? Maybe a solution is to have the first option within the My TV sub-menu, "Watch live TV now". Or even, keep what we have now, a big old TV preview on one side, and an option that says "Go to full screen TV". I don't know if this is off topic, but what I think is an important necessity, is to "separate" the business layer of communicating with the TV server and the actual graphics display. What I mean is that if Media Portal is waiting for the TV server to do something (say set up several recordings when you select "Record every time..."), I don't want MediaPortal to hang while this happens (which it does, sometimes for more than 30 seconds). I can only presume that this is because that the UI system runs in the same thread as whatever system handles communicating with the TV server. This also happens to me when I browse in the EPG - it has to fetch the data from the server, and I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs while the display freezes for maybe ten seconds. Instead, the display should "dynamically" update as data become available, like a web page displaying place holders until the images are downloaded.