Re: printing the bandwidth, length, state, and elapsed time in trplayer

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Matthew Campbell on August 22, 2000, at 18:37]

>and in what format (or
>formats) the status information should be displayed.

I can speak for braille displays, but not for speech, with respect to the
combining of the b,l,s,t commands. I can, however, see the convenience that the
current command set does give to speech users. Perhaps the solution is to have
a single lowercase command give the one-line summary for braille and sighted
users, and for the current commands to be retained, but as uppercase letters,
for speech users.

My suggestion for a one line summary is (without the indentation at the left):

    Playing  Rate:  16K  Time: 00:01:50   4% of 00:47:26

This particular layout, as described in detail below, has at least a couple of
useful features. First, it's a fixed format so that nothing ever moves as
values change. Second, it's good for both 40- and 80-character braille
displays. The percent sign is right on column 40, so that the data which
changes is always in the same half line. The precise breakdown of this layout
is as follows:

First: The status, e.g. "Playing" or "Stopped", should be at the very left, and
left-justified within a field which is as long as the longest status word
(I've assumed seven spaces).

Second: A two-space separator, the characters "Rate: ", and a four-space,
right-justified, rate value (a number optionally followed, if necessary, by a
scaling letter). Here are some examples of how this value, in a four-space
field, would be displayed:

       1
    9999
     10K
    999K
    1.0M
    9.9M
     10M
    999M

My personal experience, when dealing with data transfer utilities, is that a
four-space field is adequate. If, however, more resolution is desired, then the
field could be widened to five spaces, and the values would look like this:

        1
    99999
     100K
     999K
    1.00M
    9.99M
    10.0M
    99.9M
     100M
     999M

Third: A two-space separator, the characters "Time: ", and then the time into
the clip (or from the time the live stream was started) in the format
"hh:mm:ss". This would be the last field displayed for a live stream.

Fourth (for static clips only): A one-space separator, a three-character
percentage into the clip (right-justified, padded on the left with spaces), a
percent sign, the characters " of ", and the length of the clip in the format
"hh:mm:ss".

In addition to having a command which would present a line like this on demand,
it would be nice to have a way for it to be continually present and up-to-date.
In this mode, it would be important to keep the cursor on the line so that a
braille display would track to it. I recommend placing the cursor on column 1
so that a 40-character braille display would track to the half of the line
which is being updated.

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