Idea: Port LogoManager into common library and use it inside MP2-Server plugin (1 Viewer)

[morpheus_xx]

are the packs "overlapping"? if they contain distinct channels, we also could add simply a country code to channel/alias definition. If there are "global" channels the country code might remain empty.

 

[offbyone]

So actually we could remove a "Pack" as it is, and only need the Info what Provider the User has?
Meaning as User I do no longer chose a "Pack" when downloading, but only which Provider I have? Just like I do when scanning for channels in TV Setup? Wouldn't that make it easier and even fully automatic - if we could store the info about the provider at the end of the channel scanning process?

I know this would not be compatible with the current approach So more refactoring and recoding on the GUI side as well for the MP1 plugin.
But maybe we need to think about how to a) reduce amount of work for people maintainting mappings and b) easy of use for the end user.

 

[Vasilich]

Meaning as User I do no longer chose a "Pack" when downloading, but only which Provider I have? Just like I do when scanning for channels in TV Setup?

when scanning i just select my LNB, but not provider - there are many of them on Astra or HotBird.
And AFAIR on Astra there are both RTL channels - german and other. As i need only german channel, i need to select pack/country code/whatever else to get proper logo. So the approach Morpheus suggested (add country code to channels that can have same name but different channels itself ) seems to be more applicable.
But then we need to make it possible to select the country code by user, as i can imagine that in Germany there are many french people that want to see french RTL and german RTL. Right now this will work if the user have it in different TV groups, as we can select different packs for different groups.

 

[offbyone]

Ok so if I understand right, the Provider is actually totally irrelevant (and never used) and I can remove that from the Model. And if the Packs are only to distinguish between Language/Country then why do I need a Pack? We could simply maintain channel aliases per Locale (Country)?

So when the user wants logos for his channels, all we need to pass are the channel names the client has and the Locale (DE, EN,...) that the user wants. The service then looks for aliases in the passed Locale?

 

[Edalex]

Yes, packs are close to "logos by county" collection but we thought that each country could have several pack i.e. for different providers or territories.
But I think it is possible to stick with countries.
And since the discussion is going away from MP2 plugin iteself and we will apply its results to MP1 plugin too I'd suggest to invite some more peoples who are not browsing MP2 forums and maybe move the discussion to appropriate place.

 

[vuego]

I like the idea of a common logo storage and I think that all contributors should have change access to all logos, like a Wiki We wouldn't want to wait for a missing logo author to update a common channel, like Eurosport for example.

It would be very nice if the logos were automatically downloaded based on the user's country. Such a nice detail to see all logos automatically being populated after scanning for channels. It would certainly impress most new users. However the question is what style should be picked as default. Maybe it would be up to the skin author? And autodownload should probably be limited to one try since the user might not want it to keep trying if failing.

 

[morpheus_xx]

For MP2 I thought about downloading the channel logos the first time when they are used, not directly after channel scanning. The reason is, that you often can (and probably will) only watch a few of the hundreds or thousands channels you might receive.

 

[Vasilich]

and what about updating logos? when you got some channels for those there are no logos in repository yet, so you reported them, and those appear later in repo. when/how do you want to rescan missing logos?

 

[morpheus_xx]

I think we should have a "modified date" on the channel logo definition. A regular job could fetch the complete channel list and check for updated logos.

This lets me thinking about the "channel list": currently I see it as one big xml file that contains ~ 10000 channels, aliases and logo paths. I guess it quickly blows up to many MegaBytes. So:

• Would we consider JSON as format, as it takes much less space?
• Could we split the channel lists by country? like "channels_de-de.xml", "channels_en-gb.xml", or "channels_global.xml"...

My ideas come from the assumption that there is no web service available for searching and retrieving only the requested information, but only "dumb" xml files that needs to be retrieved completely at once.

 

[Vasilich]

Would we consider JSON as format, as it takes much less space?

not sure why it should take MUCH less space - just because of missing closing tag?

Could we split the channel lists by country?

that is actually our current packs - list of aliases (some with provider names) with links to logos, separated by country.