xbmc
[PVR] Add home menu actions for Radio and TV
Description
Allow user to choose the action on the Home menu when Radio or TV are selected. This allows one click opening of the Guide (default) Channels or Recordings. Recordings are added since some users don't use Live TV.
Settings can be saved in the Estuary menu action settings under TV and Radio. Default is Guide, which is current default action
Motivation and context
Some uses prefer quick selection of the channels view for PVR. Some of this could be resistance to change but the channel list can al be easier to read at a glance because text is left aligned, not truncated and not obscured by the current timeline highlighting and bar. Display of channel icons and full channel name can be important for some.
Users who primarily use recordings can also benefit.
Not an issue but some users don't like the order change for Nexus https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=367895 This keeps the order and still provides one click access.
How has this been tested?
Tested on current master branch of Nexus.
Tested skin only since code wasn't changed.
What is the effect on users?
Users have more control over PVR actions. Users who don't use Live TV can access their recordings faster. Closes to Matrix and earlier functionality.
One error I could not understand is how to initialize a new persisted skin setting variable. Review might clarify how to to this more effectively.
Screenshots (if appropriate):
Types of change
- [ ] Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
- [ ] Clean up (non-breaking change which removes non-working, unmaintained functionality)
- [] Improvement (non-breaking change which improves existing functionality)
- [x ] New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
- [ ] Breaking change (fix or feature that will cause existing functionality to change)
- [ ] Cosmetic change (non-breaking change that doesn't touch code)
- [ ] None of the above (please explain below)
Checklist:
- [ x] My code follows the Code Guidelines of this project Unsure, I am not sure of skin coding style.
- [ ] My change requires a change to the documentation, either Doxygen or wiki
- [ ] I have updated the documentation accordingly
- [x ] I have read the Contributing document
- [ ] I have added tests to cover my change
- [ x] All new and existing tests passed
@ronie I'm fine with functional change requested here. Could you take a look at the xml changes, please?
I've made some formatting changes to meet the current code style. The diffs are available in the following links:
- PR21516-0016-6203dd326a-videodb-show-progress-dialog-in-Cl.diff
- PR21516-0112-fb3c77654c-Add-diffuse-fading-animation-effec.diff
For more information please see our current code style guidelines.
@ronie is there anything else needed on this? Those jenkins4kodi comments resulted from a bad push. @ksooo this was part of milestone 2 but does it need to be added to the next milestone? I would like to see comments before beta.
Not for nothing, My Estuary mod already does this for just about every main menu item. I put them in a different sub-section because it was less scrolling to find it than in the menu items area.
I used a different method for handling them, but I don't think it really matters much which method or display. It would be nice to have this for all the menu items by default. One less thing I'd have to deal with in my mod.
If anyone is curious, the code is here:
https://github.com/pkscout/skin.estuary.nexus.pkscout.mod
Now if only we could revisit the idea of letting people pick the order of the menu items...
'-)
@pkscout I certainly would prefer your solution, are you proposing a PR for Estuary? The change for Nexus won't please everyone, and I've had PM's asking when my PR will be released. I don't think it should be a mod from a non-Kodi repository.
@emveepee I could, but mostly I wanted to support the desire for this. Right now my method is tied up in other changes to do the menu ordering, so it would take me awhile to unravel them to do a PR. I think we should use yours for the core change, and we can talk later about whether it should be in its own category in the skin settings.
Is there anything left to get fixed that this could be merged ?
It would fix the usability problem with the current approach at master.
@pkscout solution could be a follow up PR if needed/wanted
Not sure we should introduce a special solution to customize the click action for the PVR Home Screen item. And why limit it to just Channels and Guide and Recordings? Why not also include Timers/Timer rules/Search?
Either we support customization for all Home screen items, including all choices or do not do this at all.
I would be interested how many people out of all PVR users actually are demand for Channels instead of Guide as default action. To be honest, I know only two counting the participants of the respective discussion.
@CvH seems you have changed your mind as some time ago you asked me for what the channels window is actually needed as the guide completely covers the channels window functionality. You even suggested to remove the channels window completely. 🤔
Anyway, I will not block this PR, although I doubt that this is actually something we should have. See my first sentence for the reasons.
Not sure we should introduce a special solution to customize the click action for the PVR Home Screen item. And why limit it to just Channels and Guide and Recordings? Why not also include Timers/Timer rules/Search?
I only choose the daily use functions. Plus these options have never been easy to get to so there was no lost functionality, but I will update it if @ronie wants me too since it is not being blocked for PVR.
I would be interested how many people out of all PVR users actually are demand for Channels instead of Guide as default action. To be honest, I know only two counting the participants of the respective discussion.
The community is not necessarily aware of what we can do. A good example is my inclusion of Recordings in this PR as I know for a fact there are many NextPVR users who don't use Live TV but play recordings every day and they haven't requested a change to the default.
In the forum post that I linked to in the PR, there were two other users. Over the course of PVR history there haven't been that many requests for this Nexus change either, and I don't recall seeing praise for the change after it was made. I know I find my PR useful enough that I include patch with my tests build so I can quickly update the default skin.
i'm most likely on the same end of the discussion as @ksooo, though i think it should be a team decision if we should stick to the 'keep it simple, stupid' approach regarding our default skin or if we want to allow for more customizations.
should we decide to do so, i agree it should be implemented for all menu items, instead of just the pvr ones.
i'm most likely on the same end of the discussion as @ksooo, though i think it should be a team decision if we should stick to the 'keep it simple, stupid' approach regarding our default skin or if we want to allow for more customizations.
should we decide to do so, i agree it should be implemented for all menu items, instead of just the pvr ones.
To me this changes the nature of the PR. The idea behind it was not about making Estuary more customizable. It was simply to improve the PVR skin PR that was implemented in Nexus that some users will not like. If it had been implemented in the original PR I am not sure we would have been having this discussion.
Almost every change in the GUI will not be liked by some users. We cannot introduce settings for everything to ensure nothing changes for the user. This would be a maintenance nightmare.
Almost every change in the GUI will not be liked by some users. We cannot introduce settings for everything to ensure nothing changes for the user. This would be a maintenance nightmare.
I agree but I believe we should also respect the users and if even 10% of our users benefit from this simple change it becomes worthwhile. I believe it will be more but as a bonus there is the additional benefit to users who don't use live TV
so I just updated the RPI of my parents to a nightly build and noticed that the default main menu action changed to EPG in Nexus. Since my 70+ year old parents can't properly deal with the EPG (too small and too much clutter etc), the channel list is the preferred default view. So I would welcome such a setting pretty much now :)
@da-anda Not really a sales pitch, but my Estuary mod lets you change the menu actions for every item. It also let's you reorder the menu items along with a few other random tweaks. Here's a link to the Nexus version.
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=367827
I keep it up to date with all the Estuary updates, so other than changes listed, it's the stock Estuary. And I use it myself every day, so I'm going to maintain it.
lets you change the menu actions for every item. It also let's you reorder the menu items
THIS is what I really would like to see in vanilla Estuary, instead of hacks for single use cases.
THIS is what I really would like to see in vanilla Estuary, instead of hacks for single use cases.
I resent to this being called a hack, which your typical insult when you don't agree with a use case. It was a valid PR trying to correct for an arbitrary decision to change the Kodi default after a decade of use on various skins by users. Perhaps the best solution would be to revert your original PR until the full solution is available in Estuary.
I resent to this being called a hack, which your typical insult when you don't agree with a use case.
Sorry, I did not want to offend you. Yes, this PR is not a hack. Apologies.
To come to an end with this discussion I will open a PR that reverts the change to open the Guide instead of Channels and merge it as soon as Jenkins is green.