Function Keys

[pkasin]

Great program so far. Keep up the good work!.

Question. In STV 7, the right and left keys pretty consistently bring you back to where you were before, or to where you want to go. When watching a Live TV, or a recorded program, it seems to me that it would be more consistent if the left (or back) button on keyboard or remote stopped the video and brought you to the prior menu. I find having to hit escape and select stop, reaching to the STOP button on the remote or going to the bottom of the screen inconsistent with the standard function of the key.

Can this be implemented?

[TwistedMelon]

Super bad idea to have left stop video or exit video back to a menu. Video is not a menu, so not having the left to traverse back doesn't necessarily break the navigation concept.

Even the TiVo, which uses the 4 directions beautifully to navigate the entire UI doesn't do left to exit video playback.

You don't have to hit ESC and then select stop. You can have a command just do STOP immediately or you can use the BACK command - I have no idea what key that's assigned to on the keyboard by default. I only use a remote since this is after all, a TV-based app.

[Brent]

You can make the keys do whatever you want by customizing them. This article I published a while back has a keyboard shortcut PDF guide and has instructions on customizing any and all keys/functions.

[pkasin]

Brent,

Thanks for your help. I found the menu simplicity of BeyondTV quite nice - especially for a wife that can't use an electric can opener without asking me.

Twisted: Quite frankly, this worked very well in Beyond TV, and simplicity is wonderful. It's not a "SUPER" bad idea - even if for some reason it doesn't work for you. There are those of us with different takes on things. I realize that the Stop button on the remote works, but simple left and right means less buttons to find - especially if you watch TV in bed before you're going off to sleep.

I am beginning to really enjoy this program and as I become more acquainted with it I appreciate the power of it. Thanks for involving your user base in the development.

[TwistedMelon]

I'm just speaking from the perspective of a designer and user of z dozen or more PVR systems.

In Sage you don't really ever need to press stop. You can just simply turn off your Sage session, go to the main menu, etc. There are a lot of ways of doing things.

Pressing STOP is not the same thing as escaping the video. It actually stops the video. So if you escape out to a menu that should show a video preview after having pressed stop, there will be no video preview.

BeyondTV was/is a complete train-wreck. I can understand if you have gotten used to it and I can understand if you want to make some customizations to Sage, but the behavior you described in your OP is certainly not appropriate for a default for everyone. There are plenty of things that need to be addressed and revised in the UI, but this isn't really one of them, IMO.

[Striker:WG]

i'd like to add that having the left/right arrow keys as navigation within the video when integrated with the comskip plugin works beautifully. The keys allow you to essentially chapter skip between commercial detected segments.

Using the back button (at least on my remote) is very convienient for getting back to the menu system.

What I find more frustrating about the navigation process is when I push the back button after I have stopped live tv, it will go and retune the channel and start the playback again when all I want to do is go backwards in the menu system. This mostly stems from the fact that I come from MCE2k5 background (albiet a few years ago now) but the back button worked quite nicely on that system and I just haven't adjusted to using the left button to go back.

-Striker-