Phoenix Screen Shot Sneak Peak

[pjpjpjpj]

Stuckless, what a fantastic post.

Thanks to you and the rest of the Phoenix team for all of the hard work you have put in on the project, and for all the hard work you continue to put in. I'm sure in our anxiousness, some of us occasionally come across as rude or unappreciative, but I can assure you (at least I think I speak for most everyone) that it's not meant that way, and it's simply a result of being so anxious to get all the form and function that Phoenix promises.

Keep up the good work!

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

Stuckless, what a fantastic post.

Thanks to you and the rest of the Phoenix team for all of the hard work you have put in on the project, and for all the hard work you continue to put in. I'm sure in our anxiousness, some of us occasionally come across as rude or unappreciative, but I can assure you (at least I think I speak for most everyone) that it's not meant that way, and it's simply a result of being so anxious to get all the form and function that Phoenix promises.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks, I think it's important for people to understand that a project is more than just a random group of people churning out code. It's about building something, collectively, using a common set of goals. And Phoenix is certainly built that way. I'm passionate about Phoenix, and I'm sure the other team members are as well.

I'd also like to point out, that while SageTV doesn't contribute directly to projects like phoenix, they do offer an incredible amount of support. I don't think we'd be where we are at today, if it were not for their support. SageTV is has been great to deal with in terms of requiring clarification on details, and even adding new features. They are all about enabling us to do what we need to do.

[ohpleaseno]

Help us Obi-Wan Kephoenix. You're our only hope.

(seriously though, it's great that this project is still moving forward. Hopefully we'll continue to see great things from all the extremely talented people involved in all of these projects)

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by ohpleaseno

Help us Obi-Wan Kephoenix. You're our only hope.

And all along I thought it was Obi-Wan Kephoenixee.

[ohpleaseno]

It was more of an attempt at syllabic similarity. Don't hate on the artist.

[bialio]

Phoenix can do Malore-ish screens too.

[bialio]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

PHOOEE indeed. I too am tired of all the 'screentshot' devs who only ever tease and never give out the goods... in response, i present my masterfull UI work, all without any previous teasing of the juicy screenshot variety (mostly because I only spent about 35 minutes in studio from idea to public release)...

;-) j/k guys, the stuff looks good.. but it's pointless if you're the only ones who can use it.. ;-)

Hey Fuzzy - what part of the Malore screens are the big selling point for you? I'm working on a phoenix view that looks like Malore, but I suspect that just having two panes with shows on one side and episodes on the other is not ALL that malore is loved for....

btl.

[bialio]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8593871/Fuzz...ore_Tweaks.jpg

Another question - what ARE all of those numbers and letters? 0221, 0242, [CA], etc.

That's one thing that bogs me down when I goto a malore screen, there is so much clutter and so many weird numbers/etc floating around. Our version will be a lot cleaner......

btl.

[tmiranda]

I'm also a malore lover.

Things I really like:

- Ability to setup alternate views and switch between them with just a keystroke.
- Ability to change the number of rows that appear.
- Ability to se timebar on the right hand pane that shows how much of the show I've already watched.

Things that could be better:
- There really isn't a good place to put fanart. I'd like to see the menu background use fanart. (I'm not a big fan of fanart "banners" replacing the text on the left, or right hand pane.)

I'm assuming the following "must have" items are already on your list:
- Ability to shoose grouping, sorting and filtering.
- .edl compatibility (i.e. do all the things that are possible with the comskip playback plugin)

There's probably more that I just take for granted.....

[bialio]

Did you open the attachment above? It's just an early shot of what I was working on, but it does have the fanart as the background.

Phoenix (in general) is all about different views, and we are currently working on ways to both configure and switch around between views. Grouping/Sorting/Filtering is very rich and the sky is the limit.

Does the Malore in the STV use the "|<<" and ">>|" key to switch between the configured views?

Also Phoenix supports edl natively - comskip just works.

btl.

edit - removed talk about the phoenix_comskip_* api calls - probably too confusing. It's not a secret or anything.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by bialio

Another question - what ARE all of those numbers and letters? 0221, 0242, [CA], etc.

That's one thing that bogs me down when I goto a malore screen, there is so much clutter and so many weird numbers/etc floating around. Our version will be a lot cleaner......

Those 'weird numbers' provide context info to help understand what you are looking at, such as the left showing the number of items in a group and the right displaying info according to the chosen sorting style for the list of items in a group. In the screen shot, it looks like it is sorting by ShowID, so the last 4 digits of the ID are displayed. If a different sort style was chosen, different info could be displayed. Show ID isn't always indicative of the order episodes were actually aired, so you could choose to sort by original airing date (OA) & then it would show that date first for the lines on the right.

- Andy

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by bialio

Another question - what ARE all of those numbers and letters? 0221, 0242, [CA], etc.

That's one thing that bogs me down when I goto a malore screen, there is so much clutter and so many weird numbers/etc floating around. Our version will be a lot cleaner......

btl.

The numbers are the Episode #s. The Zap2It guide data provides a long string to identify the episodes like, EPxxxxxx or SHxxxxx. The last 4 digits are the episode # and will match with the episode #'s from the IMDB database. Note: Episode #'s are sequential (approximately) and don't restart from one season to the next. Sometimes episodes are aired out of order (e.g. 1,2,5,6,3,4,7,8).

Malore lets you sort by episode number or by original air date. I usually prefer original air date, but sometimes episode # works better. I do like to be able to see the numbers in some view.

I believe the [CA] indicates that Comskip was run on that file and it sees the text file (edl or whatever). Personally, I don't use Comskip, so this is not useful to me. If anything, it would look better if someone made a pretty icon for it.

Many Malore views also show both the record date and the original air date.

I'm a dedicated Malore user. The biggest advantages to me of Malore are:

1. multi-pane menu layout makes it easy to see things at a glance without drilling down into sub-folders.
2. All Movies are treated as a single show called "movies" and get grouped together (I have over 100 movies recorded off premium cable channels, and I don't want to sort through them all to find the latest episode of my favorite sitcom).
3. Can easily set-up multiple custom views on the same menu and flip through them very fast (with the skip fwd2 and skip bkw2 buttons). For example, on my Sage Recordings screen, my main view is grouped by show and sorted by original air date, my second view is grouped by date and sorted by date (makes it easy to find a group of back-to-back recordings and watch them in order). I also renamed one of my custom malore menus as "sports" and added separate views in that screen for football, baseball, basketball, hockey, racing,...
4. I like seeing the channel logos here too.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by bialio

Phoenix can do Malore-ish screens too.

Watched bars. You need Watched bars somewhere. Either in the right side of the screen (like in Malore meus) or maybe somewhere in the header where the fanart and episode description is.

The Movie group is a big must-have too. I like to keep the recorded movies seperate from the series recordings.

Gerry

[bialio]

The way I have my views set up in phoenix there aren't any movies in the TV section - recorded movies show up over in 'Videos'.

I know this won't be to everyone's liking - but to me the two big buckets are TV and Movies. I don't care where they came from, that's how I split them browse them.

I'm sure we'll have a movie grouping available (SageMC had this as well) but the option for the movies to show up somewhere else all together is something new and (I think) better.

btl.

[Skirge01]

I definitely prefer having everything in the same place, but separated via filters or views. I don't want to back out or jump to a completely different place in SageTV (even if I can do so with a single button press) in order to view movies. I like a single interface. The malore menu switching sounds like a pretty good method for this, but I've never used them before. I currently use TVE and bring up the filter menu to filter what I want, so a quicker method of doing that would be nice.

[OneOfMany]

I'm with you bialio.

My preferences are:

- dedicated TV screen to merge/show recorded TV and TV-series sets
- dedicated movie screen to merge/show recorded movies/DVDs/BDs
- dedicated video screen to allow sorting/filtering of the other video categories I create (as of now - MusicVids, HomeVids, Educatational Vids, Shorts (internet crap )

It really allows us the separation of video that we like

Grant

[Dreameriz]

I agree would be nice

Originally Posted by OneOfMany

I'm with you bialio.

My preferences are:

- dedicated TV screen to merge/show recorded TV and TV-series sets
- dedicated movie screen to merge/show recorded movies/DVDs/BDs
- dedicated video screen to allow sorting/filtering of the other video categories I create (as of now - MusicVids, HomeVids, Educatational Vids, Shorts (internet crap )

It really allows us the separation of video that we like

Grant

[Fuzzy]

The single biggest feature of Malore that I like are the Different Views. that is the one thing it has that no other UI I've seen has, and it's one thing noone has even starterd to implement. The two pane display (which you do seem to already have) is also great. I'm not sure if I like it because it is the easiest for me to use, or if it is just what I was used to coming from a dish network DVR - but in my mind it just makes more sense.

There are, obviously, things about it that need updating (hence me looking at trying to make some improvements), but it has survived over the years quite well, with minimal overall changes (Thanks Andy for keeping this thing relevent), I think because it DOES work very well in a LOT of different situations.

[Fuzzy]

As for the movies - I am intending to be able to split out Movies into a different Malore view, then have that view, for instance, grouped by Sub-Category... It'll take a bit of extension to the filtering system - which if I get free time, will be the next tweak I make.

[Fuzzy]

More info:

[CA] means Comskip Available or something... looking in studio, it only shows up if a .txt file is there (notice, it doesn't even check for .edl - this is old bloat that has been there since Malore made it many moons ago, and could certainly be removed) It is redundant as the Comskip Playback plugin already adds a CS icon to the screen, i believe.

[CC] means Closed Captioned - but in reality, it, like [CA], is really only shown if there is an .smi file.

Malore was originated a long time ago, and has have no official caretaker since Malore's departure from the community - so things like this have been left in. It is also evident that it was done ages ago, as almost everything in it is text based - no extra icons, even the description is just a long string, strung together with [OA]: and such as item headers.