pimp my mythvideo: navigation patch

Even though I can’t code in C++, or anything more hardcore than bash (and even that’s pretty sketchy), with a push in the right direction from a noble soul in #mythtv, I managed to mangle a patch together for MythVideo that fixes some annoyances that I’ve had for a very long time. They are:

• Filenames won’t display underscores, but folders would
• Getting rid of the “cover image” screen in the gallery
• No page up, page down support with your remote

The patch is here, which should apply cleanly to media-plugins/mythvideo-0.20.2_p15087. Or you could just try and use my overlay directly. If you look at what I’ve changed, it should be really simple to make the same changes to the most recent version for SVN, since I don’t think the file has changed much between releases. Creating patches is also not my favorite thing to do, and in fact actually took me longer to create the actual diff and apply it correctly then it did to hack the code.

Here’s a complete list of what I changed, if you don’t want to go digging around the code and determining what’s happened for yourself:

First, the issue of page up / page down. Sure it’s nice that you can do that with a keyboard, but if you are using a remote, it’s painful scrolling when you have a lot of folders to look through. I remapped 1 and 7 to emulate Home and End, and 3 and 9 to emulate Page Up and Page Down.

Second, for the display of folder names, if it has an underscore in the title, that is replaced with a space. This is consistent with the naming scheme for the actual files.

Third, and always most annoying to me, is that I got rid of the information screen that displays all the metadata about a movie after you select it in gallery mode. I always thought that was pretty useless, because I already know what I want to watch, and didn’t like having to hit enter twice to start playback. There was a shortcut already, you could just hit the Play button and it would skip the screen, but I think this is more effective and natural.

Finally, I disabled the Menu, Filter and Info options by commenting them out, for the only reason that I never used them and sometimes they would pop up when I was debugging stuff with mplayer and my remote.

Needless to say, I’m much happier now with my user experience, since MythVideo is all I’m using right now. I have a really low tolerance for small tweaks that bug me, and I’m glad I finally got these taken care of. Besides, it’s forced me to start learning some C++ (again) so I don’t have to keep relying on people to help me get started.

Now I can go back to watching Roger Ramjet and Knight Rider in navigation harmony. It’s great. 🙂