Keyboard Navigation (2 Viewers)

[ge2301]

My keyboard is quite new and has not a context menu key

I see. Tastes are of course different.

For me there are too many featues. If you need them, they are helpful, but can be also confusing. I do not need 4 different types of EPG (Main, Full, Mini, OSD), one is completely enough for me as in WMC. Also I do not need 3 different styles of showing media information in OSD when playing a file.

I don't want to say the features are meaningless, but I think it would be better to show less and by settings let users show everything.
At least I'll try to reduce the EPG's to max. 2 and OSD information to 1 for WMC skin. In skin settings the advanced controls can be e.g. activated. But I want to avoid that users are overloaded or confused and we see that quite often from feedbacks.

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.

I do not need 4 different types of EPG

Agree. The only EPG I'm using regularly is the Full one. From there I schedule my recordings and I also start watching Live- TV.

The 3 OSD levels for TV

This I like. It's useful to have a quick access to the info for next upcoming program. Maybe we can reduce it to two by adding the full information about the current running program to the "overview OSD"...

My keyboard is quite new and has not a context menu key

So you've got yourself the wrong one...
My keyboard has this key also it was very cheap (less than 7,50€ incl P&P). And it's quality is astonishing good, much better than I've expected.

 

[morpheus_xx]

The OSDs are usually self hiding after a timeout (I think 2 secs), except the TV OSD (because of its multi-level approach). When TV OSD was only a single one, it did also auto hide again. We could restore the behavior of course or make it configurable.

The auto hiding then does only consider the time from opening the OSD. It currently does not reset the timer when you do further navigation, i.e. to move focus to the player control buttons. This can be changed quite easily as well.

Media Keys of the keyboard are not working. They do work in Windows Media Player

This needs to be checked, we can output the raw input codes to see why they are not handled.

When thinking about more shortcut keys you have to consider that in list views you navigate to items by pressing the letter keys ("x" can skip to "X-Men" inside your long movie list). This is quite useful for keyboard users. This also means that you can't use the letter keys for player shortcuts, they would interfere with the list view navigation.
For this reason all plugin navigation shortcuts are UPPERCASE (M: Movie, S: Series, T: TV, G: Guide, W: Weather etc.)

 

[Lehmden]

except the TV OSD (because of its multi-level approach)

Maybe we can add a bit longer time-out to multi-level OSD and reset the timer if the user operates on the OSD somehow?
Another thing (or two)... Also we have a time-out on OSD I'm pretty used to push "back" (no matter if on keyboard or remote) to leave the OSD before the time- out closes it. This is how it's working nearly everywhere else but in MP2 this leads to leave the Full Screen playback, something that most likely is not wanted in this context. Even after years of using MP2 this still happens accidentally from time to time..

And is there a key defined for stopping media playback? "Space" is pausing, but how to stop without a mouse? Had this question raising lately in the forum and I couldn't answer it... BTW it was to support a FLIRC USB Receiver (very interesting product for sure) that send standard keyboard commands to control mostly all Windows apps with nearly every available remote, not only universal or programmable remotes. Someone wants to configure it for MP2, but he couldn't find which key to press for "Stop"...

 

[HTPCSourcer]

When thinking about more shortcut keys you have to consider that in list views you navigate to items by pressing the letter keys ("x" can skip to "X-Men" inside your long movie list).

I am not saying that we should have more of those. I am not even a friend of keyboard navigation as I don't remember most of the mapping. I use it here for the shere lack of a remote.

For this reason all plugin navigation shortcuts are UPPERCASE (M: Movie, S: Series, T: TV, G: Guide, W: Weather etc.)

And that's fine. That said, an alternative mouse navigation would be a good thing. It's already mentioned in our project list.

I'll have a look at our current descriptions in the New Wiki and will modify it where I think it may help

 

[CyberSimian]

For this reason all plugin navigation shortcuts are UPPERCASE (M: Movie, S: Series, T: TV, G: Guide, W: Weather etc.)

This is exactly the opposite to the way that MP1 has defined them.

In MP1:

(1) On panels with lists, upper case letters are used for "quick find", i.e. move the focus to the first item in the list that begins with the letter typed. There is some logic to this, since most items in the list will be the names of TV programmes, or music CDs, or music tracks, and hence are likely to begin with a capital letter.

(2) Lower case letters are used as panel shortcuts, to move to a different panel (e.g. "h" for the "Home" panel).

As a general point, why does MP2 not support exactly the same keyboard keys as MP1? Having identical meanings will ease the user's migration from MP1 to MP2. (Or, to put that another way, different meanings may result in the user becoming frustrated with MP2, and deciding to stay with MP1 .)

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[morpheus_xx]

This is exactly the opposite to the way that MP1 has defined them.

Question to our (former) WMC users: how is it handled there?
How it does Kodi?

 

[Lehmden]

How it does Kodi?

Will check it later on my Raspberry Pi.

This is exactly the opposite to the way that MP1 has defined them.

From a comfort point of view the MP2 approach is much better as you only need to press one key for the often used navigation inside a list and two keys pressed for the seldom used navigation between plugins...
I can understand the logic about "names starting with capital letters", but I clearly prefer the more comfortable approach... Laying on the couch and having the keyboard on the table it's way more easy to press a single key than to sit up and operate the keyboard with two hands...

 

[CyberSimian]

From a comfort point of view the MP2 approach is much better as you only need to press one key for the often used navigation inside a list and two keys pressed for the seldom used navigation between plugins...

Actually, I was quite surprised when I discovered the case-sensitivity in the meanings of the keyboard letters in MP1 -- I would have expected whatever function was assigned to the alphabetics to be case insensitive. Of course, if that were done, only a single meaning could be assigned to those keys -- either "quick find", or panel shortcuts. Mmm, a difficult choice, I think.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[HTPCSourcer]

In MP1:
(1) On panels with lists, upper case letters are used for "quick find",

Aha. That explains why I have never been able to use the keyboard to short-cut the acces in long lists - I was just pressing the key. Makes sense though unless you don't exclude the menu short cuts while navigating within a list of movies, series or music titles. That would also be a theoretical possibility to eliminate the lower/upper case problem.

As a general point, why does MP2 not support exactly the same keyboard keys as MP1?

Well, it should be allowed to improve things, but I certainly see your point. Being a MP1 user now for 8 years I was not aware that I had to enter a capital letter in lists rather than just pressing the key.