TASEmulators / TASEmulators/BizHawk

[F.Rq] 'Play Movie' dialog improvements

Open
#3,735 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

App: EmuHawk Request: Feature/Enhancement
Dominant language
C#
Stars
2.8k
Forks
468
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

I was just talking about this in Discord, and I realized I don't really use the 'Play Movie' dialogue anymore, and I haven't used in the last few months when I've been using BizHawk fairly regularly. There are a few reasons for this (maybe some of these could be split into separate issues).

  • 1. One major issue I've had is that the play movie dialog can get really slow if you have too many movies because it has to calculate the time duration for each movie, which currently involves reading the entire input log. Even a few movies could be somewhat annoying. (see also: #2198)
  • 2. The main issue for me is that I tend to work on movies very slowly in a version independent manner, so I try and keep each of them near a directory specific to their game. So generally I just drag+drop or use recent movies to play my movies back because my movies are missing from Play Movie's default directory. Maybe Play Movie could be enhanced to also populate from Movies > Recent? Or perhaps there's another solution for either my workflow or Play Movie UI?
    • [2024-08-05] My solution recently: set the max items for "Recent" extremely high. But long-term I'd like better TAS project management in general, where multiple movies/RAM watch/scripts can be associated as part of a single "project": #3988
  • 3. Another side-issue is that for .bk2 files, it's annoying to edit basic movie metadata. TAStudio has Metadata > Header..., but for .bk2s, I generally just resort to extracting their contents and editing them manually. Play movie already displays basic metadata, so it could potentially allow editing basic movie metadata like authors, although I don't entirely like that solution from a UI perspective.
  • 4. (2023-08-15) On Discord, it was pointed out that the file path takes up a lot of space in the play movie dialog, making it difficult to see the actual filenames. I agree, although if it was abbreviated to just the filename, I think there should still be a convenient way to see the full file path (perhaps another option under the right-click context menu Edit for Open file path? Or probably more sensibly, just a separate column)
  • 5. (2023-09-22) I recently realized Play Movie will automatically override your `On Movie End` setting to be `Record`.
    • (2024-08-06) Split out into #3989

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No source files or tests are named. Start by locating the Play Movie dialog implementation and review which unchecked improvements remain, especially metadata editing and file-path presentation. Confirm the scope against the checked items and the issues split into #3988 and #3989 before defining completion.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.