My TV: Better channel switching (New: Layout sketch) (1 Viewer)

[tomtom21000]

I know it is not the time for new features

Switching channels via mouse is a bit too complicated:
It takes 2 clicks to go to the next channel
hit channel up once: mp shows current channel.
hit channel up second time, mp switches channel.
:arrow: switch channel on first click, please.

A channel overview:
Maybe using channel logos like in my music for files, to directly jump to a specific channel and not go through the channels one by one. This is important for channels from which you don´t know the channel number. Or using an OSD menu?

tomtom21000

 

[tomtom21000]

New idea for the requested channel overview. The idea for faster channel choise is pretty much as the radio station are shown.

Maybe give a possibility to group tv channels in folders.
This could be "Sports" "News" "Favourites" "Music" "foreign language" "cartoon" "Regional" for example.

This would give a structure to my 40 TV channels. And I guess some people have much more.

Could be used for Radio stations as well: "Rock" "Techno" "Oldies" etc.

tomtom21000

 

[MrMario64]

I like that genre thingy.

Like on my car radio I can skip to the next rock programn.
Wouldn't it be great to skip to the next movie on the air.

We need to think up a nice system for this indeed.

 

[tomtom21000]

Ok, it took a long time (see date of last post) but finally I can come up with a really good layout proposal (As least I hope so).

The advantages on one glance:

# reduces number of clicks/ moves necessary drastically
# produces an overview of 20 progs at once
# is equally suitable for mouse and remote users
# it would give mp a unique selling position as I haven´t seen this layout on any other program (cut this, I am being only too enthusiastic about my idea )

O.K. here is what I am thinking about (as a osd):

Now you have to click channel, then click right or lett until you reach the desired channel. This means you need up to 20-30 clicks in my case with 40 channels.
(In fullscreen you can enter channel number directly, but only if you know it.)

My proposal is:

Flexible Genre
Have a genre associated with the channel, like "news" "sports", etc. (See Nr. 1)..
I would suggest to have 5-6 standard genres but make them renamable, so if someone does not need "music" he can rename it to "documentary" or whatever.

Most flexible would be to put in setup "Add" so the user can decide how many genres he needs. Provides also "up" "down" for sorting the genre list.

Very fast channel switching

(See Nr 2)

With mouse you need only 2 clicks to change a channel (1 more if it is not on the first page). 1 to bring up the osd like the pic above, 1 to choose the program.

With remote/keyboard you have very short ways too. When the cursor by default is placed somewhere in the middle of the screen. You need in average not more than 3-4 clicks (left, left, up , ok - for example)

Have the same channel in different genre catagories

This also accounts to flexibility (See Nr. 3, Example "Pro 7")
I think it would be enough to be able to assign one channel to max three genres ( For this probably 3 fields in the database are necessary, unless you create a unique number for any possible combination of genres - got to recall my statistics lessons

Additional graphics to page up/down/left/right

(See Nr. 4). The left arrow is missing. I realized to late and it would have been hard to rescale every item in the sketch I made, so I left it to you imagination)

I´s propose this to be a page up/down/right/leftt. Again to minimize count of necessary actions (Means instead of scrolling)

Great overciew

You see 20 programs at once.

Concepts I know:
-----------------------------
Win DVR:

You get a long list as osd like

channel 1
channel 2
channel 3
...
...
...
channel 40

Takes you ages to find the desired channel
--------------------------------
Win TV2000:

this has the genre thing though i never cared to implement this. But I guess it works like this:

News-------------| N24 | CNN | Euronews
Music
Sports

News
Music-------------| MTV | MTV2 | Viva
Sports


You only see the channels of the chosen genre. That is not so good when you are not sure in which gentre a channel will be (It is easy for sports and music, but there might be genres where it isn´t that easy. So with the proposed grid approach you do not have to go through every genre, but see genre and associated channels at once.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Future enhancements

1. Instead of displaying channel logos, a click on the genre title could result in a channel scan through the channels of this genre giving a video still of the current program on every channel in this genre. You might know this from TV sets. But this takes rather long, so nobody wants to do this for 40 channels. But for 5 channels, this would be cool I think.

2. It might be combined with EPG somehow. Maybe only display the shows of one genre. But this can be integrated in the EPG views, once a genre thing is introduced. Might be better.

3. This might also be usefull for the radio/internet stream section.
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Long post. When you read this last line you must be interested
Interested in your comments.

tomtom21000

 

[high]

2. It might be combined with EPG somehow.

perfect idea...realy perfect
For the EPG a would kill the last line (here Sports) and show up there the EPG-Information to the channel selected above (like mouseover).
Thats in a way like the "Bouquet"-Selection on my DBOX2@Linux, but even better with Channel-Pics (and maybe EPG). It wil be really interesting with DVB-S support and his 100+ channels.

 

[mama]

Hmm, I don´t know if I would use this view that much. For my needs (and I think a lot of people here), a quick overview of what is shown now, next or i.e. at 20:15 on as much channels as possible would fit the needs the best. Your matrix would be a really good layout for this. So you can show 20 channels with the title of the show at once. That´s something EPG can´t do until now. A kind of dropdown like "view as" in pictures or music could select the time to be shown.

 

[tomtom21000]

2. It might be combined with EPG somehow.

perfect idea...realy perfect
For the EPG a would kill the last line (here Sports) and show up there the EPG-Information to the channel selected above (like mouseover).
Thats in a way like the "Bouquet"-Selection on my DBOX2@Linux, but even better with Channel-Pics (and maybe EPG). It wil be really interesting with DVB-S support and his 100+ channels.

I like this.: use the last line to display epg data of the cursor position! yes, very good indeed.

mama: To clearify: My main intention is not the EPG, my main intention is to have a very quick and comfortable way to switch from one channel to another. If something useful for EPG comes out too, thats fine.

tomtom21000

 

[cheffe97]

great idea. since I need mouse support I would really appreciate this to be implemented!
cheers
cheffe

 

[waeberd]

Good job tomtom!

This would be a great improvement, I don't specially like the current channel-control-button neither.

I was thinking of an info "currently running of focused channel" at the bottom before I read potablos suggestion.
:arrow: Seconded: This would be very nice!!

One question/suggestion:
Is it always possible to "segment" the channels into genres?
And do those genre "segments" have about the same size?
I mean, sports and news channels are easy to assign but what about other channels that send a big variety of stuff?

I think that in my case I would have a big favourites-section and some few entries in sports / music and news.

This would lead to a big FAVOURITE line where a lot of scrolling would be necessary again... thus spoiling some potential of the great idea!

:arrow: how about telling MP how many LINES a GENRE can fill in this screen?

for example:
FAVOURITES: 3 LINES => up to 15 channels on one screen
MUSIC: 1 LINE => up to 5 channels on one screen
NEWS: 1 LINE => up to 5 channels on one screen

Would be even nicer with this, reducing scroll-paths!


This thing is very cool..... don't stop brainstorming!

Cheers,

Daniel

 

[tomtom21000]

Daniel: Favourites/3 lines:

If you get full control over the naming you could name line 1 Favourites, line 2 favourites and line 3 favourites. At least favourites1,2,3 if they could not have the exact same name. fits already in the concept.

chatted with MrMario64 about this today:
on first sight he thinks we should seperate the genre thing and the grid for quick channel switching into 2 seperate views. Maybe he is right and it is a bit overloaded the way I suggested it. Still thinking about it.

tomtom21000