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Author Topic: Theater View Usability  (Read 15412 times)

mojave

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #50 on: October 30, 2013, 05:04:47 pm »

The second problem arises when I tell her to switch zone to get audio. She switches zone and STILL no audio. Why? Because the audio is STILL playing in the other zone. So she hunts me down once again and at this point in time public diplomacy is needed (and our child is screaming because her favourite movie is playing WITHOUT sound). To solve the matter I have to ask her to do the following (and now I have to buy flowers for a month):
Do all of your child's movies always go to the same zone? If so, then setup ZoneSwitch so the switching is automatic. I have 5 or 6 zones and the family never has to think about switching zones since it is automatic based on content type.
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csimon

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #51 on: October 30, 2013, 05:23:32 pm »

Zone Switch is temperamental and doesn't always work.  See my posts 6 and 9!
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dean70

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #52 on: October 30, 2013, 07:03:55 pm »

One of the themes I linked to in the other thread shows the currently active zone on the main Theater View screen. Admittadly I havent thought too much about zones since setting up ZoneSwitch. The only main bugbears is the volume gets reset to 20% on the new zone and Gizmo does not recognise ZoneSwitch, so have to manually select the target zone.

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Mikkel

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #53 on: October 31, 2013, 02:17:52 am »

Do all of your child's movies always go to the same zone? If so, then setup ZoneSwitch so the switching is automatic. I have 5 or 6 zones and the family never has to think about switching zones since it is automatic based on content type.

Hi mojave,

Not necessarily but I do see your point. Which "zone" we want to use depends on our mood. Sometimes it is nice to playback in full surround other times the TV is quite sufficient.
So I have no predefined preference for any type of playback. Another example is that I don't want all my amps on when we are just listening to "background music". In these instances I just want stereo playback (instead of upmixing). At other times I want to enjoy the immersion of sound.

And I know I should check which zone is active and switch before pressing playback. I can live with that but my wife cannot... and I would like to live with my wife so one way or the other it would be really nice if glynor's and my thoughts would be considered by the jriver-team  ;D.


Best regards,
Mikkel
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glynor

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #54 on: October 31, 2013, 06:57:32 am »

it would be really nice if glynor's and my thoughts would be considered by the jriver-team  ;D.

I'm sure that, generally, they agree.

Unfortunately, it is a "sticky issue" because (as I mentioned), I certainly want to retain the ability to use Zones the way they work now (where each Zone has its own Playing Now).  How do you set it up that way?  It isn't the simplest UI issue, even discounting any technical issues behind the scenes.
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Mikkel

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #55 on: October 31, 2013, 07:12:54 am »

If you can make subsets of zones it could perhaps work, like:

Zone 1: Kitchen
Zone 2: Office
Zone 3: Home Theater
Zone 3.1 : Night mode
Zone 3.2: Stereo
Zone 3.3: Surround
...

When opening theater-view it would default at zone 3. Maintaining access to the other zones would still be possible if zone selection in Playing Now or More is kept in the UI.
Within zone 3, when switching subzone the content in the currently selected zone will be moved to the new zone.

Anyway, just a thought. And as you say, the technical aspects may be more difficult than I imagine.


Best regards,
Mikkel
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MrHaugen

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #56 on: October 31, 2013, 08:06:02 am »

As I've mentioned before... I really, really think that some better default views for Theater View would go a long way towards solving the "Theater View is limited/ugly meme" as well.

While I agree that things could be improved with for example the default views, I do not think that would improve the impression of a "dull" Theater view very much. There's undoubtedly some tweaks that could be done to give users more useful views. But the fact is that theres so many different opinions about how things should be displayed, that we'll never get a great consensus here. Improved, yes. But how much?

I'm super convinced that there is one major thing that's lacking in Theater View today, when it comes to usability. One thing that would dramatically increase the user friendliness and usability aspects of Theater View. And that is Theater View options within Theater View it self. While most of the users of JRiver today deal with the fact that we have to create our own views in standard view to suite our own taste, this is by no means the normal way of doing daily operations in such interfaces of other applications. Most users would not know where to begin to create their own views or customize what's there. To attract the "normal" casual users things needs to be simple, and at the same time we have to maintain the options for the veteran and experienced users.

Options in theater view could be an item on the roller of each view. Which gave the users the ability to dynamically add certain criteria to each view. For example, people could have a few views with some good default settings. They could easily filter out watched items with the options. They would select their wanted genre of movies. They could sort movies from highest to lowest TMDB score and so on. All such settings should be temporary within a MC session, and reverted back to the default view settings when MC close. It should even revert to defaults when users change. So everyone starts with the same defaults, and can customize from there on, to suite their needs.

How complicated would such a thing be? I don't know. It's certainly doable. Other Media Centers does it. I don't think it would even be that hard to have such rules applied on the fly over the existing view rules? It would certainly give the users a super powerful tool to customize based on their need right then and there.  Adding this to a skinning framework, and allowing adding and editing those functions for skins would be even better. It could open up a new world of possibilities.

That's my opinion anyway. If anyone cares to go off the green MCE button and Zone route :D
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csimon

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #57 on: October 31, 2013, 08:17:17 am »

Unfortunately, it is a "sticky issue" because (as I mentioned), I certainly want to retain the ability to use Zones the way they work now (where each Zone has its own Playing Now).  How do you set it up that way?  It isn't the simplest UI issue, even discounting any technical issues behind the scenes.

In Playing Now (with a very obvious title that indicates what zone it is!), tap/click/enter/OK on the zone name to pop up a dialog of all other zones, one of which you select and, behind the scenes, the Playing Now of the destination zone is cleared, the current playlist is copied over to destination zone and playback is started exactly where it left off, the current zone's playlist is cleared, and then the Playing Now screen switches automatically to the destination zone. Thus the change of zone (location, sound effect, mode, group of rooms...whatever you're using zones for) should be transparent to the user and look like simply changing the zone name of the current playlist.
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Matt

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #58 on: October 31, 2013, 09:31:17 am »

There are a lot of ideas being thrown around here, but let me put my oar in the water with a simple proposal:

On the top roller, add a zone roller that's always there.  It would show the name of the current zone.  When you pick it, the secondary roller would be a list of zone names that you could use to change zones.  It would only appear on systems with more than one zone, so it wouldn't add noise for a user that doesn't use zones.

For extra credit, do the same for user accounts.
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Hendrik

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #59 on: October 31, 2013, 09:34:34 am »

Unfortunately, it is a "sticky issue" because (as I mentioned), I certainly want to retain the ability to use Zones the way they work now (where each Zone has its own Playing Now).  How do you set it up that way?  It isn't the simplest UI issue, even discounting any technical issues behind the scenes.

I agree on this, and i wanted to bring it up myself.
Some people use Zones as Configuration-Sets which they switch between, and some people use Zones as, well, Zones, and then there are the glynors who even use both!

Using it as a pure configuration set isn't working 100% in many areas of MC (mixed playlists can't switch them, audio doesn't "follow" your zone, ...), so its something that as a whole would need more attention, if thats a strategy we decide to pursue. I (ab)use it as a configuration system myself, but luckily not in any way that would break it, only for audio (which i usually start remotely from Gizmo or another PC), or video, which i launch from Theater View, and which have slightly different DSP and output settings (and i never mix audio and video)
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Matt

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #60 on: October 31, 2013, 09:42:12 am »

I agree on this, and i wanted to bring it up myself.
Some people use Zones as Configuration-Sets which they switch between, and some people use Zones as, well, Zones, and then there are the glynors who even use both!

When adding ZoneSwitch, we spent a lot of time debating if we should do settings or zones.

We decided on zones because it didn't introduce a new construct/complexity and provided more deterministic behavior (settings could get you into situations where some files wouldn't play for mystery reasons, etc.).
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

MrHaugen

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #61 on: October 31, 2013, 09:54:35 am »

On the top roller, add a zone roller that's always there.  It would show the name of the current zone.  When you pick it, the secondary roller would be a list of zone names that you could use to change zones.  It would only appear on systems with more than one zone, so it wouldn't add noise for a user that doesn't use zones.

For extra credit, do the same for user accounts.

That sounds like a good solution. Extra credit for thinking of the User accounts as well :)
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Mikkel

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #62 on: October 31, 2013, 11:16:28 am »

There are a lot of ideas being thrown around here, but let me put my oar in the water with a simple proposal:

On the top roller, add a zone roller that's always there.  It would show the name of the current zone.  When you pick it, the secondary roller would be a list of zone names that you could use to change zones.  It would only appear on systems with more than one zone, so it wouldn't add noise for a user that doesn't use zones.

For extra credit, do the same for user accounts.

Hi Matt,

It would certainly solve the problem of transparency regarding the active zone and make zone switching a lot easier.

It wouldn't solve situations where you'd like the currently playing to be transfered to a new zone. That's why I proposed subsets of zones. It would allow people to use zones for different physical locations (which I guess was the original intention with 'zones') while making it easy to switch settings on the home theater client (and avoiding angry wives!).

Anyway, it is definately an improvement and I can only put my thumbs up  :).


Best regards,
Mikkel
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Hendrik

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #63 on: October 31, 2013, 04:58:35 pm »

I kind of like the concept of hierarchical zones, where the top describes an actual zone and the sub zones just define different playback settings. However I have no idea yet if it's possible to integrate sanely or how much effort it would be.

I shall keep this in mind and discuss it with the guys at some point.
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AndrewFG

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Re: Theater View Usability
« Reply #64 on: January 14, 2014, 10:32:19 am »

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