Engineering practice
Glossary
The vocabulary, in one place.
# Terms
- M3U / M3U8
- A plain-text playlist. Each entry carries a display name, optional attributes
(
tvg-id,tvg-logo,group-title) and a stream URL. Carries no programme schedule. - Xtream Codes API
- A JSON HTTP API exposed by many IPTV panels. Authenticated with a username and password against a base URL; returns categorised live channels, films, series and short-range guide data.
- EPG
- Electronic Programme Guide. What is on now, and what is on next.
- Panel
- The provider's server. Also, loosely, the provider.
- HLS
- Chunked streaming with an
.m3u8manifest. Supports adaptive bitrate. - DASH
- An alternative adaptive streaming format. Supported; a DASH stream carrying DRM still fails at the licence step, which is correct rather than a bug.
- Raw TS
- An unchunked, endless MPEG transport stream over HTTP. No adaptive bitrate, no seeking.
- Stable key
- The provider's own identity for an item, stored alongside the row. What favourites, resume points and guide entries are keyed by, so they survive a refresh that reassigns every row id.
- Refresh
- Re-fetching a source's catalogue and replacing it wholesale. The only bulk network operation in the app.
- Zap
- Moving up or down through the channel list from inside the player. Live only.
- Focus settling
- Focus resting on an item long enough to mean the viewer is looking at it, rather than passing through. What gates guide prefetch on the television.
- The gate
./gradlew build detektAll coverageAll lint. Run locally before pushing, and run again by CI on every push and pull request.- Profile
- Who is watching. Owns favourites and resume points; everything else on a device is shared.
- Guest
- The throwaway profile. Its favourites and resume points are deleted when the session ends, and again at startup, because a killed process never gets to tidy up.
- Coverage (of a catalogue)
- How much of a library the metadata cache has an answer for, over distinct cleaned titles. Quoted on screen beside the genre filter, because a filter is only as complete as the cache behind it. Not to be confused with test coverage.
- Scan
- Describing a whole catalogue at once, rather than a tile at a time. Resumable, and it stops itself when the service refuses.
- The sweep
- Running the acceptance criteria on physical hardware and recording the results.
- Hollow feature
- Something that appears in a UI or a feature list but cannot be reached, or changes nothing when used. Nine were deleted in one afternoon; the term stuck.