I agree these settings wuld be nice.  But right now there is no clean way to do
it exactly.  Because of the way we do the scrolling animation, the server has no
way of knowing how long the scrolling takes.  Its a function of the player
model, font size, and not just the number of characters displayed but the
combined width of those characters.  If you watch the screensaver you'll notice
that it jumps to the next feed before it reaches the end of the scroll, because
even though I tried, I couldn't get the timing exactly right.

But if you're willing to edit the perl code, you can easily control some aspects
of this.  The file to look at is Plugins/RssNews.pm.  These lines near the very
top of the file... 

# how long to scroll news before switching channels.
my $screensaver_sec_per_channel = 0; # if 0, we use sec_per_letter instead
my $screensaver_sec_per_letter = (1/6); # about 6 letters per second
my $screensaver_sec_per_letter_double = (1/4); # When extra large fonts shown

so for instance if you wanted to double the time before switching channels,
change 1/6 to 1/3, and 1/4 to 1/2.  But as you point out its still based on
time, not number of scrolls.  However if you always use the same player model
and font, you can find numbers that come really close.

We could expose these values in the html config, but I frankly I don't think its
a clean enough solution.  I'd rather wait until theres a way to know exactly
when the scrolling has completed.  Although I can't say how soon (if ever) that
might be.

While I could easily play with the perl that would mean installing it since I
use the compiled service under XP.  I think I will wait until a better solution
comes out since it is not a critical bug.

However, I don't understand why the server doesn't know how many times it
repeats the same scroll.  How does scroll pause work?  Also since it is based on
time I don't quite understand how any hacking can change it reliably since the
RSS feed are all diffent lengths.

Oh also, since this seems to be more of an enhancement request, I'll reopen it
as such so it doesn't get lost.

it is true that there is a scrollPause, but plugins have no access to that
detail in the server. It is also implemented differently depending on player
style, so that really isn't something that the rest of the server can be aware
of, let alone a plugin.  its possible in the future that the scrolling will even
be done in hardware on the Squeezebox2, thus making it even more complicated.

one possible solution would be to have the plugin set some animation parameters
in order to control the timing, but that may not be a very good user experience
either.  I can just imagine a very long slashdot post flying by in order to fit
withing a fixed time limit :)

one idea for the record, could be to have a simple 'tick' sent out from any
given animation once per cycle.  This could then be counted.  This is still not
trivial and certainly lies beneath a large list of higher priorities.  However,
this can now sit her for the time when someone comes along who might be looking
for inspiration.

Marking items that aren't going to be addressed immediately in 6.1 as future.  Please update if this is in 
error or the bug has already been addressed.

Daryl,

Is this still relavent with 6.1 and 6.2 RSS - these use a new scrolling 
mechanism and hence don't repeat in the same way.

Unassigned bugs cannot have a priority.