Pause button

[Bernd Wechner]

A feature request, not a bug, but I see no way to submit those yet aside from this launchpad bug manager.

As a newb just running Me TV I admit to deep frustration that once I start playing a channel I can mute it but I can't pause the video. Only way I can find to do that is close Me TV. But I'd like to be able to pause it, stop consuming any system resources streaming the channel, without closing Me TV and having to start it again and find my channel again.

Is a Pause button not the logical partner to any Play button (which Me TV has)? Curious.

[djk4883 (djk44883)]

First let me point out I've been a user of me-tv for several years, not involved with the project.

me-tv isn't designed/intended to watch, record, rewind or pause LIVE tv. It's fairly simple layout to schedule recordings of television programs. Which I find it does a great job doing. There's little to configure, and it doesn't try to look like more than it needs to.

I suppose after a month you figured this out and/or moved on.
   Doug

[Bernd Wechner (thumbone)]

With all due respect I think when you write "me-tv isn't designed/intended to watch, record, rewind or pause LIVE tv." you misunderstand the request and the use case somewhat and are misrepresenting simple design as well.

Currently, if you run Me-TV and start a station playing, that's it, consuming GPU/video resources and producing sound without any ability to stop it short of quitting the app. If it's not designed to watch TV then my mind is literally blown away a little, I read no-where in the process of trying it out and did not divine anywhere in the UI that its primary intent was your use case of quietly scheduling recordings. Now as a TV viewer, I can of course mute my PC great, but while watching something will commonly want to stop the playback, cut the sound and resource consumption while something else needs to be done. Then come back and continue watching.

In this use case, you have to quit, restart, find the station again and start it. All way weird when every single video app ever encountered has a way (a pause or stop button) which leaves you in the app but playback is stopped. Such a button is a simplification of experience, no overhead on layout (a super familiar button) and its absences has nothing obvious to do with simplification of anything not even layout.

But sure, if I find something else that plays back better, off I got. Because this lacking feature is a showstopper for, more or less. More or less because I don't actually watch TV (who does anymore?) and put a TV receiver and played around with TV for my wife alone who had one show per annum in mind that she's watching and preferred on the free to air version to the streamed version fro some reason ;-).

If anything kills development on Me-TV and related products it'll be the obsolescence of TV itself. But that said, I'd much rather hear from a developer (about the minimal effort to add a stop button as opposed to rather serious effort for me to find the source assuming it's open source, build it, get my head around the GTK or QT code and add a stop button to my own fork ... which is more effort than I'll give it for now, but if I were geared up fro a project like this, such a button is a small job, and I'd love to hear the arguments against it, not having been won over one jot by the argument of simple interface - as the use case outlined points out, it's more complex without it, not more simple).

[Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi Bernd, doesn't it minimise to the tray or something? Agree, the obsolescence of TV was truly this project's demise.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

I started a C++ rewrite with GTK+3 and GStreamer but it became a pain so I started a fresh with Rust, which has turned out quite nicely. Television viewing is fine,now to do the EPG. Tuning assumes dvbv5-scan is present.

Freeview is alive and well in the UK but I suspect I am the only person using USB DVB devices to watch it.

https://github.com/Me-TV/Me-TV

[Bernd Wechner (thumbone)]

Good on you Russel!

[Russel Winder (russel)]

@bwechner Thanks. There is no release of my Me TV v3 as yet, so you have to clone the GitHub repository and run "cargo run". Obviously this requires a Rust and Cargo installation as well as having dvbv5-scan, gtk+3 > 3.10 and gstreamer > 1.12 installed. Currently there are only two known users, both of whom are happy with this workflow. If there were more users, some of whom couldn't work with having Cargo and Rust installed, a way of having a continuous release executable file would be found.