Frame by Frame forward

[sam_nazarko]

I usually just take it back ten seconds and squint to see the text if missed.
If I frame advanced in this house I’d probably suffer a torrent of abuse to just watch the program.

@randallspicher

I wouldn’t take any time away from the upcoming 21.1

That’s done. I just need to write up the release notes.

Then we move on to Bookworm and full 64-bit and Pi 5 support

I can understand frame advance is a want. I think there are some technical reasons why it isn’t going to be realistic. And as codecs become more and more complex and rely on other frames (previous and forward) it will likely become a relic in the future.

[randallspicher]

For frame advance, I wouldn’t bother with anything other than maybe adding a button to the OSD screen for it (since complex remote key combo moves is not always obvious to figure out)

Heck, all that is needed is to paste in something along these lines into the OSD toolbar if there’s room.

				<control type="button" id="728">
					<texturefocus colordiffuse="FocusColor">osd/button_bg.png</texturefocus>
					<texturenofocus colordiffuse="22ffffff">osd/button_bg.png</texturenofocus>
					<width>64</width>
					<height>64</height>
					<label>$VAR[Icon-StepForward]</label>
					<align>center</align>
					<font>IconNormal</font>
					<onclick>PlayerControl(FrameAdvance(1))</onclick>
					<enable>Player.Paused</enable>
				</control>

[randallspicher]

BTW, I actually upgraded one of my unused vero4ks to bookworm a while back so that I could repurpose it as my home automation server (running home assistant under docker). Needed to upgrade to get some newer package versions which were needed. Other than being stuck on the 4.9 kernel (the built in debeian kernals don’t know how to install themselves on the vero) it otherwise runs fine. Of course, I’m not using any of the video capabilites (I disabled the mediacenter servirce to free up more memory for docker, and I don’t have any display attached)

[darwindesign]

@randallspicher

I think the “left/right” direction buttons for remotes defaults to the 30 second skip forward/back.
Or maybe that’s a 10 second skip (after I do a test…) possibly I configured that somewhere though.

The direction buttons are keymapped to skipstep actions in the FullscreenVideo window. When the controls are showing and your doing this frame advance that mapping is for the “VideoOSD” window.

[theoldfarter]

@randallspicher

heh. when I was 10 I would probably have said the answer was “boobies”

I love this part of your answer! In my case, at 77, it is more of a case of Frame Advance to remember what “boobies” looked like.

[grahamh]

I use this a lot for troubleshooting and have done since @chillbo added it to the skin. It does indeed advance one frame at a time (which might be equivalent to one field at a time for interlaced and telecine’d material) and I haven’t yet found a video/codec it doesn’t work on.

There is, however, a limit to the number of frames you can advance - probably determined by some buffer somewhere.

[darwindesign]

Kodi has a “ChapterOrBigStepForward” that does either chapter advancing or large skip step depending on if chapter are present. Too bad Kodi doesn’t have a “StepForwardOrFrameAdvance” that switched behavior depending on if the video was paused so you could have a logical control mechanism for this function that didn’t rely on extra navigation or a dedication button mapped to it. A dedicated button might not be so bad if running a PlayerControl(FrameAdvance(1)) action automatically paused a playing video if it wasn’t already, but it doesn’t, and does nothing noticeable if you call it without the player paused.