[linux-dvb] Re: KaxTV : feedback needed

["Prakash K. Cheemplavam" <PrakashKC@gmx.de>]

Hi again,

I just did a quick test, and this are the things which I found:

> > > - scan : click on the green TV button.
> > Uhm, could you tell me where that button is? I can't find it.
>
> First, thanx for testing :)
> Did you make install, needed to have kaxtv's icons installed ?
Nope I didn't want to mess up my gentoo installation.

> This button is the top-left one on the dvbpanel (tooltiped "channels").
Ok, the channels button. Noithing grren there in my case. :-)

So scanning works fine. (Do you also get only about 23% strength? At
least I have about 70% snr). Though scaning is not slower than the
stand-alone recevers I have it is rel slow compared to "MyTheatre",
which is a windows app originally written for my dvb card. I dunno
whether it is linux driver or kaxtv taking so long. I think time
intensive task usually is "reading pmt".

What sucks hard is the way of adding channels: I had to manually select
a single channel every time and add it. Multiple selectioning wasn't
possible. Furtermore I probably was to dumb to use filters. Must they be
ticked prior to scanning? After scanning it didn't seem to work.

One problem with channel names: Though in console they look ok, about
the first two dozen names contain a lot of squares in the names. Like
Premie_re_Start or alike (_ reprrsents a square) or _S_uper_ RTL_, etc.

Channel switching is nice. First it was damn fast, then after a crash
(see down) it was a bit slower, but still OK.

Timeshifting works nicely (in contrast to xine's one) except the loop
problem you hinted at. BUT I tried to switch a channel while watching
time shifted channel and then it hang. Without using timeshifting this
didn't happen.

OSD works nicely. So it only crashes if xine dvb engine is started via
kaffeine's menu entry.

EPG works, as well. More EPG highly apreciated. :-)

> kaxtv doesn't use the xine dvb plugin(i may disable it). you have first to add 
> channels (or better scan) by clicking on the "channels" button to get your 
> channels in the dvbpanel's listbox. (channels.kax will be stored in ~/.kaxtv)
> then double click on one.
Yes I found it out. As I stated above, in my first test I started xine's
dvb engine by choosing the menu entry.

> while the device is used by xine dvb plugin, kaxtv can't open it, so can't get 
> card info.
Ok, a better error message would be nice. ;-)



So all in all, a very promising 0.1 release. I am looking forward to
testing next release.

If I may add some suggestions (for later versions):

- enable a permament customizable timeshift ram buffer, so you can go
back a few minutes while live watching w/o having priorly pressed pause
(todays machine have lots of RAM, so giving some 100MB for buffer will
have a nice purpose then)

- different colouring/icons (probably I just haven't seen them because I
didn't do make install, so my fault :-) for encrypted/fta channels,
tv/radio services and method of adding channels as such.

- make ac3 output available (playing and recording, I dunno how to
record or even selct ac3 soundtrack in xine, at least never worked for me)

- perhaps make channel change possible with one click and keyboard (if
not already there, at least I dunno which keys to press to switch channels)


I haven't tried the recording button, but I guess it works fine for m2v+mp2.


Really nice work, so far! I can't wait to get e new version into my
hands. So I gotta bug the kaffeine devs to debug the shut-down crash
which happens in my case. :-) Maybe in the meantime I'll try to hack out
an ebuild for my usage...


Prakash




--
Info:
To unsubscribe send a mail to ecartis@linuxtv.org with "unsubscribe linux-dvb" as subject.