[vdr] RFC - wakeup-timer

["Richard Cieply" <CIEPLY@de.ibm.com>]

Hi list,

as many of you I use nvram-wakeup with vdr which works really fine.
But there are times when I would like to wakeup the VDR-Box at certain
times
(say every night at 4am for instance) and not only
when a timer is about to start a recording - what is today's behaviour.

What do you think about a 'wakeup-timer'?
This timer could be like any other timer (one-shot or repeating) except
that it would
do nothing.
This would be a dummy to allow vdr and the shutdown-script to set other
times
to wakeup besides 'real' timers.

A simple implementation could be to set the programm number to '0' what is
an
invalid programm number, I think.
If a timer is set to programm '0' the timer name could be set to 'wakeup'.
If a timer with programm '0' fires nothing would be done by vdr...(except
the usual
timer handling stuff).

I know one could programm  a 'real' timer with very low priority and
duration one minute
but one would then need to deal with this dummy recordings, which is - what
I think - ugly.

Here are some use cases for such a wakeup-timer:
- I use master-timer to programm vdr. If I'm on a business trip
  or holiday my box should record all "what-have-you" episodes
  which don't come in fixed timeslots. Therefor the box needs to
  come up frequently (once a day), update the epg-data and run
  master-timer.
- I'd like to sync some mail and news at night for my private
  LAN news- and imap-server.
- I like to watch news in the morning while taking my tea and
  trying to wakeup. My box should be up and running when I enter
  the living room - I know: I'm lazy.
- ...

Regards
  Richard