I've recently started using Freevo to watch & record TV, and there's a few niggling issues, or missing features with Freevo that bug me.
First up is the record padding. It would be REALLY nice if there was a separate pre- and post- record padding. Shows here have a tendency to start anywhere from on-time to minutes late, and can quite frequently run even later. Ergo, I need a minimal pre-padding (a minute or two), but a large post-padding (up to 15 mins). I've hacked my own Freevo to support Pre/Post padding, and it works quite well. Ideally, it'd be nice to set this per-channel, since some channels are pretty decent, while others vary wildly. Second up, a related issue, is record scheduling. I'd really like to have the option of editing the details of a record item. I've had times where the Guide has been a little inaccurate (and now once where the finish time for a show was out by an hour). Sure, I could manually add an item to record and stick in ALL the data, but it would be much easier to just go "Schedule to Record", then "Edit", and tweak those values which need it. Such a facility should be easy to implement in the Webserver (and I may have a go at it myself if no-one else wants to), but it'd be nice to have it in the normal interface as well. Next, which is sort of a mix of the two above - an easy way to "tweak" the padding of a recording/recorded show. So if you KNOW a particular show is famous for running overtime (chat-shows have a tendency to do it here), you can easily add/remove extra record time, say, in 2 minute chunks? (Gee - can you tell I've missed the last 5 minutes of way too many shows? ^_^) The next idea is also Recording, but a different slant - transcoding. I have a DVB card, which means I natively get good quality mpeg2 streams saved when I record. This takes up quite a bit of disk tho, so stuff I want to keep, I'd like to transcode into DivX. I have a little script I whipped up to do this for me, but it's a manual process. What would be great would be an option within Freevo to tag a recorded show for transcoding. Even better would be a few transcoding options, for different bit-rates (cooking shows (don't ask ^_^) don't need as much bitrate as movies), and different cropping options (some shows are 16:9, some are 4:3 - the signal/stream is always 16:9). This could probably be done as a Plugin. I might give it a go myself if I get time (Ha! Ahem...) I'd envisage a separate Transcode Daemon to take care of the transcoding, perhaps auto pause/resuming transcoding based on system load and/or other Freevo activity (ie; if Freevo not playing anything, and not recording, then Transcode!). There could also be options to auto-transcode if a show is old, and disk is low... Something that's been mentioned briefly in the past - the auto-icon support. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it really doesn't. I've had shows where the icon was of the show before (which still had recorded bits of) - and sometimes it shows an Ad. The former can be avoided by picking a frame nearer the middle of the show, rather than the start. The latter is a bit harder to fix. One solution would be to have an option to regenerate the icon which shows a selection of images (9? 12?), and you select which to keep as the icon. Oh, and while I'm at it - support for widescreen layout of Freevo menus would be appreciated. ^_^ Also, maybe some variants of the standard skins using smaller fonts? (And more TV Guide columns? Is that definable?) Lastly - a "bug" of sorts. I keep having issues watching DVB streams (ts/mpg) with Freevo. Sometimes it sucks all my CPU (not a very fast one), the Sync goes straight out the window, and sometimes I get black dots scattered around & in the borders of hard-white output. I *think* it's rogue unneeded filters for mplayer kicking in, but I've yet to reliably disable them. Any ideas? -- Trevor Phillips - http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ Web Technical Administrator - IT Services, Murdoch University "On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of course. But mostly evil, on the whole." -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters) ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: IT Product Guide on ITManagersJournal Use IT products in your business? Tell us what you think of them. Give us Your Opinions, Get Free ThinkGeek Gift Certificates! Click to find out more http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/guidepromo.tmpl _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users