gaz.***:- The 'Home' Screen is still set to BBC files.... I beleive the homescreen should remain blank... This allows the menu to load quicker, whereas at the minute, all the thumbnails have to load first.
- Would it be possible to choose the channel, time or cat first....before it loads up anything, or have a browse option which shows everything? (Just to help the overall speed).
- The way the top menu selection works - it is quite hard sometimes to read the menu options due to the overlay onto the thumbnails - could there be a coloured background of the menu to make navigation easier?
- Is there a way to make the thumbnails smaller (like the list view in Recorded TV) - or a way of just having titles and no picture? (again, improving the speed?). Or a way of showing just the titles, and a intermediate screen (like Vista MC) with the program details/pic and "play now"?
- I noticed a few times the program stopped responding once or twice, i beleive this is due to it caching all of the files (the suspect machine was running on wireless, which may have been causing it to slow down).
Gaz,
thanks for the feedback - it really is appreciated.
With the "Home" page - it's not loading the home page that takes time - that takes a fraction of a second, and the images come in the background. The reason it takes so long is that it is caching the ITV and C4 content at the same time. If I didn't display the Home page items, there would just be a blank screen for 20 seconds, which may make people think it has crashed.
I did want to add ITV and C4 content to the home page, but they didn't have any similar concept to the BBC of programs they particularly wanted to highlight, so there was nothing I could add.
I guess I could not cache anything up front at all and only download the content when you come to use it, but it makes it much slower when it comes to change channels to ITV or C4, which wasn't particularly good. I'll think that one over though.
The menu background opacity could certainly be decreased.
With a list view instead of a thumbnail view, I did wonder about having a list of programs, then drill down to a list of episodes. That would run faster, but I am not sure if it would look as nice. I'll think that over too. I wish there was a way to use the right-click menu to add switches like this - anyone know of a way?
As for stopping responding, there is a lot of network traffic, and although I try to do it all in background threads, perhaps there are some parts which are blocking. I'll take a look.
Thanks
Martin
http://www.milliesoft.co.uk/