feature req: Customized Marks

[snoopy]

The new season has STARTED and now we have too much to watch, Hooray!

I have been trying to figure out where best to put this post. The delima my family and I now have is how to tell all the many good recordings apart? Consider the following questions and adapt them for your own family or household:
How do I tell what are my wife's favorite recordings, my wife's brother's favorite recordings, my favorite recordings, etc?
How do I tell what recordings apply to two or more of us?
How do I let each person know when we have all watched or not watched something?
How do I tell what is 'very important', 'less important', and 'only in case of emergency' favorites and/or individual recordings for each person so that each member of my household knows what can and can't be deleted?

The problem lies in that the senarios are so different for each household and therefore, such a system may become very difficult to design and will likely take a few months or more of design and feedback to develop. The topic of more advanced categories and how to display this information for favorites and individual recordings has been discussed. I am sure Frey will eventually add something like it as a feature. The design of such a system just from the standpoint of GUI alone seems like it may take a while before a truely usefull system for telling household members apart exists.

So I got to thinking... How we could make this easier from the perspective of initial development? I think a 'custom mark' import might work? Take the little 'first run', 'archive', and 'watched' icons in the attached screenshot for instance. What if we had the ability to simply assign a custom icon to each individual recording and/or favorite? This approach would let each household design for themselves icons telling them whatever they want to know about the recordings.

Consider the following examples:
JI RED ICON = Joes important stuff
JI BLUE ICON = Joes less important stuff
RI RED ICON = Robbie's important stuff
DI BLUE ICON, DW NO COLOR ICON & RI WHITE ICON = Darla's less important stuff and Darla has watched it, Robies emergency stuff and she hasn't watched it.

The point is that it really does't matter which icons are used or how they are colored and lettered. You could customize them the way you want and change them along the way as they are watched and as your preferences change. Of course you would probably have to limit the number of marks you could choose for each item due to space requirements as you can see on the screenshots.

IMPLEMENTATION
The design of this mark list could be easy also. Consider the 'ADD NEW MARK TO LIST' feature. It could simply ask the following:

1) Choose letter(s) and/or number(s) for this mark
2) Choose the color for this mark
3) Give this mark a name that will appear in the list

Right click (ctrl-0, remote button, or whatever) on a recording or favorite and select the new right click menu item called 'CHOOSE A MARK(S) FOR THIS PROGRAM'.

One could then simply choose them which mark(s) to display for each recording or favorite from that list of customized marks.

How does everyone feel about this approach?

[ke6guj]

I don't really care how it get implemented, but we do need a way to track multiple users favorites lists, what each person has watched, and only allow deletions when everybody who needs to watch something has watched it.

I could set up a couple Sage boxes for friends and family if it would support multiple users. For instance, my parents have 5 vcrs set up so that my mom can record stuff to: tapes that only she watches, tapes for my father, and tapes that both of them watch. And if she watchs stuff on the "both" tape, then she marks on the paper that she has seen it and that as soon as pops has watched it, he can put the tape in the "empty" pile. Until I can set up a sage system to work the same way, No Sage for them.

[Steve2112]

I'm glad I'm single for multiple reasons LOL.

[bluenote]

Not to sound like a downer here, but I don't think there is much point in trying to implement a 'mark' system -- it would end up being a day late and a dollar short for the reason that you are never going to get the users to interpret and utilize it properly (and if you do, then you don't have a problem to begin with because they could keep track some other way).

I'm afraid in my opinion the only way to do this properly is to create some kind of personal favorites deal, which is (basically) a set of filters that handles the concurrence of deletions, watched status, etc.

Personally, I don't have a use for it, but I'm guessing that more families use Sage than not ... but it still seems like a programming intensive task for not-so-much tangible benefit done properly.

There *are* some flags you could jury rig, Watched, Archived, Don't like come to mind. If don't use IR for example, don't like really has no use and can be commandeered for your use...

Cory

[snoopy]

Originally Posted by cnovak

There *are* some flags you could jury rig, Watched, Archived, Don't like come to mind. If don't use IR for example, don't like really has no use and can be commandeered for your use...
Cory

This is my point exactly. I could jury rig thos marks to mean what I want and someone else with differen't needs could do the same.