pause feature
This is a feature of pausing DVB stream that is included e.g. in mplayer. It could be useful for example to pause TV for 10 seconds to bring more crackers from kitchen.
Playing DVB-T stream can be paused, then the stream is cached until playing is unpaused. Then play speed is unchanged, played stream is delayed to original live stream. Pause/unpause can be used several times. There should be also "Resync" button skip stream data currently cached and reach live streaming.
It can be probably implemented using a pipe which is recorded into and that is played back in Me TV.
When user presses "Pause" button, the pipe starts to grow and the image freezes. The paused state lasts until one of these events occur:
1) it is unpaused by user by clicking "Pause" button again,
2) Me TV decides there is danger it will consumes too much memory/disk (configurable in Preferences) and unpause it automatically.
After unpaused, user can do several actions more to "normal" state:
A) He can press "Resync" to drop the pipe content and catch the live stream.
B) He can also switch the channel or close the application - in both cases, the pipe content is dropped.
C) Optionally there would be "Forward" button to step forward in stream (number of seconds configurable in Preferences) that also decrease the pipe contents size a bit. But user must be careful because there would be(?) no "Backward" button.
D) Optionally there would be a possibility to slightly increase the playback speed. This should be very decent to user cannot notice it. This can make the playback hit the live stream after some time and switch to "normal" state.
E) Optionally there could be "Backward" button also, but it could need two pipes. Then data from first pipe (where recording writes into) goes to be diplayed, then they are not dropped but go to second pipe and from second pipe are discarded. Buttons "Forward" and "Backward" changes the border betwen first and second pipe. But I cannot imagine if it is possible to implement such thing.
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Not started
- Approver:
- None
- Priority:
- Undefined
- Drafter:
- Roman Polach
- Direction:
- Approved
- Assignee:
- None
- Definition:
- Discussion
- Series goal:
- None
- Implementation:
-
Not started
- Milestone target:
- None
- Started by
- Completed by
Related branches
Related bugs
Sprints
Whiteboard
Roman Polach's Note:
This is one of two features of "mplayer dvb://" which I miss in Me TV...
(the other one is LIRC support for channel switching and volume control)
and which is blocking me to stop using "mplayer dvb://" completely in favour of Me TV.
Michael: This is not really valid argument, I feel. I don't think that you can compare mplayer's features to Me TV's. You could easily argue that you should get mplayer developers to implement Me TV's features. If you think that mplayer's DVB abilities can be matched against Me TV's then maybe Me TV is not the right application for your use.
So we need a pause, forward, backward and resync button, possibly also a 2x button. Hmmm, lots of work.
Also, it would be nice if you could use the scroll wheel to seek through the video buffer (like totem). I was planning on using the scroll button for the easy channel change but maybe it's more appropriate for this feature.
I think that this would be best incorporated into a complete time-shifting solution (ie play/pause, rewind, fastforward currently playing channel). Essentially, this would mean caching the last 1/2 hour or so of a channel (configurable in preferences, up to a point) and then allowing all playback options on that, much as applications like MythTV do at the moment. Where me-tv is different from these sorts of applications, is me-tv is not a full media centre, nor should it try to be, but remains a full-featured DVB application for the gnome desktop. This is probably more of a long term goal than anything that will be implemented soon. -- Matthew Vermeulen
Michael: This feature is lacking in detail. Developer needed.
