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Newbie experience improvement suggestions

Added by Antti Kaihola over 9 years ago

Hi,

I'm a newcomer to Tvheadend, but a somewhat experienced MythTV user. I've previously set up Tvheadend successfully on OSMC/RasPi, and am now reinstalling newest OSMC on a RasPi 2.

I couldn't get the thing to scan any DVB-T muxes. While debugging this problem, I noticed a few things which could easily be done to make things easier for a new user:

  • In the web UI, my adapter was detected, and I proceeded to manually add a Network. It's unclear whether the "Network ID" field is important and what it actually means. Also, "(limit scanning)" isn't explained anywhere. There's no Help link in the "DVB Inputs" section, and I couldn't find other documentation explaining this.
  • Same goes for "Network discovery" - an explanation of what that option actually does would be helpful.
  • At this point it's surprising that I have to go back to my adapter and assign it to the newly added network. Could unassigned adapters and networks be marked with a warning? Could assigning be done also from the network side?
  • Manually adding a Mux is fairly straightforward, but it's unclear why I can't change Name, Original Network ID and Transport Stream ID, or why the IDs are 65535.
  • There isn't a way to force a scan or restart the service from the web interface. Also, options in the "Debugging" tab are not saved even if I click "Save configuration". After a service restart, all fields are blank again and there's no debug output.
  • The "Help" button doesn't work in the "Debugging" tab.
  • I ended up running tvheadend on the command line, but the --debug and --trace options are undocumented. The best I could find was on the Debugging wiki page, but names of subsystems aren't listed
  • I eventually found out the +all, mpegts, linuxdvb etc. values for --debug and --trace and wanted to contribute these to the wiki. I registered only to find that the wiki really isn't a wiki at all - users can not edit content.
  • The DBV configuration wiki page doesn't match the current version at all. Maybe create version specific pages?

Thanks for reading, I hope this helps the project! I do know Tvheadend is a reliable piece of software since I successfully ran an earlier version for a few months.

-Antti


Replies (3)

RE: Newbie experience improvement suggestions - Added by c128 m over 9 years ago

Also being a new user, I'd agree with most of this, and also add a few of my own (some of which I really miss from ArgusTV):

  • There doesn't seem to be a way of filtering (not just sorting) the "Services" list. If you use DVB-S (especially from multi-satellites) it's very difficult to navigate and cherry-pick channels, as you often don't want the full bouquet from foreign satellites. If there were, for example, filtering by Service Name, as with Channel names in the EPG, that would be make things so much easier.
  • Scanning for channels doesn't provide a means to "Ignore Encrypted" (or even "Disable Encrypted") - that would be hugely useful for folk that are only interested in FTA.
  • What does the "Hide" drop-down in the "Services" list actually do? It's not listed in the help...

Antti Kaihola wrote:

  • The DBV configuration wiki page doesn't match the current version at all. Maybe create version specific pages?

For me, there's a bit of lack of clarity over what really is the "current version", so I think that's part of the problem. It seems 3.4 is really the last stable release, but is anyone really using that?

RE: Newbie experience improvement suggestions - Added by Mark Clarkstone over 9 years ago

c128 m wrote:

Also being a new user, I'd agree with most of this, and also add a few of my own (some of which I really miss from ArgusTV):

  • There doesn't seem to be a way of filtering (not just sorting) the "Services" list. If you use DVB-S (especially from multi-satellites) it's very difficult to navigate and cherry-pick channels, as you often don't want the full bouquet from foreign satellites. If there were, for example, filtering by Service Name, as with Channel names in the EPG, that would be make things so much easier.
  • Scanning for channels doesn't provide a means to "Ignore Encrypted" (or even "Disable Encrypted") - that would be hugely useful for folk that are only interested in FTA.
  • What does the "Hide" drop-down in the "Services" list actually do? It's not listed in the help...

Antti Kaihola wrote:

  • The DBV configuration wiki page doesn't match the current version at all. Maybe create version specific pages?

For me, there's a bit of lack of clarity over what really is the "current version", so I think that's part of the problem. It seems 3.4 is really the last stable release, but is anyone really using that?

You can filter services very easily.

filter.png (53.7 KB) filter.png

RE: Newbie experience improvement suggestions - Added by c128 m over 9 years ago

Mark Clarkstone wrote:

You can filter services very easily.

Oh! Never noticed that - thanks for that :)

...will be using that on my next run through the service list.

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