UI Improvements - Improve File Position Seeking

Feature Requests
1

The thing I’m having the most trouble with using my Vero is seeking positions in files when I want to skip ahead or find a scene.

I find the way Kodi does it extremely frustrating and would suggest a new option - using the remote direction options make up and down move 10% each push along the playing file, and left / right move 1% each push.

Or perhaps optional amounts ( 5 ~ 20% and 0.5 ~ 2% )?

2

So, what is wrong with the skip steps you can configure at GUI->settings->player->videos->Skip steps?

The defaults (1 x short button press is 10 seconds, max. sequence of 6 x short button presses makes 10 minutes jump) were always sufficient to me to reach a specific point in the video.

3

Also, the up/down arrows will do a chapter skip in videos with chapters, but will also skip 10 minutes in videos without chapters.

You can also skip arbitrary distances forward/back by typing numbers for the time then hitting the right or left arrows. Last, you can skip to an exact point by typing the number then hitting OK. These two require a remote other than the default OSMC remote, but that is very easy to set up.

4

If you want to use percentage based skipping instead of time based you will need to add options to an advancedsettings.xml file such as…

<advancedsettings>
  <video>
    <usetimeseeking>false</usetimeseeking>
    <percentseekforward>1</percentseekforward>
    <percentseekbackward>-1</percentseekbackward>
    <percentseekforwardbig>10</percentseekforwardbig>
    <percentseekbackwardbig>-10</percentseekbackwardbig>
  </video>
</advancedsettings>
1 Like
5

Apart from a preference to work in proportions I also don’t like what happens when you hold an arrow down.

I should be clear - I don’t want the instruction to repeat on a held down button (otherwise one nearly always rushes to the end of any file).

I don’t find the idea of clicking quickly to make greater skips occur natural - and I want the use and control of my media player to be as natural as possible.

So that when I buy others for my mother or friends I don’t have to try and educate it them on unique features.

6

Cool, thanks. I’ll give it a go. Guess I need to have a good read of that wiki link on advancedsettings.xml.

7

I guess I should also point out I’m asking this from the point of view of a consumer using a Vero 4k+ and not someone installing software on other hardware.

While I might be willing to SSH in and editing things my request in intended for users of the devices UI.

8

The behavior and feature your talking about is stock Kodi behavior. Something has to be set as default, and the Kodi team decided to go with time based skip steps. The Vero is a hardware platform for running Kodi. Fortunately Kodi does allow you to alter the behavior and timing to your liking. Although manually editing an xml file may not seem very user friendly, I don’t think most people would find a settings menu with literally hundreds of options to be desirable either.

9

I’m not asking for hundreds of options, so I disagree with you.

But if people don’t want to offer the option I suggest that’s fine - here’s another suggestion that would stop something that drives me mad - don’t quickly repeat the command to skip when the button is held down, or modify that behaviour somehow (so it behaves more as one might expect, and not just rush to the files end without warning) so that the user can see the file position moving (if not the picture changing [I can appreciate that is a problem in the digital world] and stop when they see they’ve reached around-about the place they seek.

10

What I meant is there is literally hundreds of options and settings that can be tweaked and modified in Kodi. If you looked at the advancedsettings wiki you have seen there is a lot shown there, and that is not even everything that can be tweaked with just that one file. If everything was put into the UI settings pages it would be beyond daunting for most, and a nightmare to find common settings for all. You want to use percentage based skipping, that’s fine, I told you how to do that. If you really think it should be in the UI or the default behavior changed then you would have to take that up with the devs over on the Kodi forum. We don’t control that decision.