The web interface needs a rewrite

Tony Houghton

Are there any plans to rewrite the web interface? Its list of faults is too long and vague for a conventional bug report, it really needs a major rewrite. Most of the faults come from its UI framework. Presumably it's some sot of off-the-shelf library which was chosen before it was easy to find a decent one. It's badly designed, has many bugs on top of the design, it's non-responsive (to the point it's almost completely unusable on a tablet let alone a phone), ugly, outdated etc. Could it be replaced with something like Bootstrap perhaps?

mpmc

Tony Houghton wrote:

> Are there any plans to rewrite the web interface? Its list of faults is too long and vague for a conventional bug report, it really needs a major rewrite. Most of the faults come from its UI framework. Presumably it's some sot of off-the-shelf library which was chosen before it was easy to find a decent one. It's badly designed, has many bugs on top of the design, it's non-responsive (to the point it's almost completely unusable on a tablet let alone a phone), ugly, outdated etc. Could it be replaced with something like Bootstrap perhaps?

It is planned, but like a lot of things, it's in a long list of other things, you're more than welcome to help though :).

Jonathan Thomson

You're not mincing your words there are you Tony?! :P

Anthony Thomas

There's some apps available if you want to schedule recordings, check EPG etc on phone/tablet.

I find the web UI easy to use on a computer, definitely has its issue but with the limited number of people actively contributing it won't improve quickly. As someone who isn't contributing I'm not going to complain!

Tony Houghton

Yeah, I've got a tendency to be blunt I'm afraid. I'm not sure how much help I can be. I am a programmer and even wrote my own channel scanner so I could add LCNs to VDR and MythTV (I originally had more ambitious plans) without having to assign each number manually, but I don't have experience of web app development focused on the server, or tvheadend's code base.

I used to use VDR for years, but it didn't support remote clients well, and never had a credible playback client unless your DVB card had its own playback hardware. I've also tried MythTV, but I think tvheadend has a better core design. Putting all the setup in a web interface is a great idea, and if you think I've been hard on it, you should see what I think of mythtv-setup!

I have to say tvheadend's developers have done a great job of figuring out how Freesat manages LCNs, but they have missed a trick. Freesat's BAT is duplicated on every transport stream, so you only need to connect to one to get the entire list of channels. My scanner takes seconds instead of minutes.

davep

I'm another refugee from VDR taking a look at this project. It's good to see that many features which needed patches, plugins or manual intervention in VDR 'just work' in TVH.

I have to agree though that the web interface is daunting, and I wouldn't want to use it for day-to-day management. I'm currently hacking together a simple replacement for 'vdradmin' which might be useful for other ex-VDR users.