[vdr] Some suggestions,

[Dennis Noordsij <dennis.noordsij@wiral.com>]

Hi (new to this list),

First, let me say that the DVB-C card has been the best add-on I have ever 
bought for a PC. And VDR is an extremely well-done program, thanks very much 
to the people who have helped to develop it!

While getting ready to set up a dedicated old pentium PC as a permanent 
(always-on) VDR, and playing with VDR itself, I have some 
questions/suggestions. I have read the FM and have tried searching the 
mailinglist archives first of course, and these are the things I was not able 
to find a good answer for (apologies if it was there anyway and I missed it!)

I also don't mind working myself on implementing these suggestions, but I'd 
rather find out beforehand if it is impossible/undesirable/etc :)

Also, please don't consider any of this criticism, VDR is an excellent piece 
of work!

* The Finnish cable network uses both QAM-64 and QAM-128, for now I am using 
the diseqc field in channels.conf and a small modification to the VDR sources 
in order to specify the right QAM settings on a per-channel basis, but at 
some point it will affect so many people it could be added to channels.conf ?

* While watching live TV or a recording, it would be nice to be able to bring 
up the full program info (such as provided in the schedule menu) in addition 
to the short version already provided.

* A menu entry (would be a plugin I guess) showing DVB signal strength, error 
rate, etc, just for the geekyness of it all :-)

* While watching live TV or a recording, showing info about the stream, i.e. 
bitrate, available audio/subtitle streams, etc. Provided this information 
(especially the bitrate) is known to VDR without having to do any further 
parsing of the stream itself.

* It would be nice to have a schedule showing all programs on all channels, 
rather than only for the current channel. I understand VDR already caches 
this information, and together with the existing auto-scan feature after a 
certain time period of inactivity (i.e. every night on a dedicated VDR) this 
should be possible? It makes it easier to select shows you want to record 
(not having to do it for every channel seperately).

* While viewing the schedule list (see above suggestion also) it would be a 
very nice feature to somehow highlight (different color or mark) shows which 
are already marked for recording. I've found that even with the limited 
channels available here and the many series airing I often end up wondering 
if I already selected a program or not.

* The big thing, which I am sure has already been discussed before, recording 
shows based on the name. I.e. every day there is a Seinfeld episode here (I 
know I know, we are so behind!! :-), could be a generic timer which records 
anything matching "Seinfeld", regardless of channel or time, automatically 
updated every time new EPG data is available.

* An external plugin (read: perl script) through which all known program data 
is piped, which filters out programs matching a certain keyword or 
expression, such as an actor/actress, director, or description, and 
automatically schedules the show for recording (low priority). This is of 
course an extended version of the suggestion above this one, and would 
replace it. When more EPG data becomes available, this process is repeated to 
update the timers. I imagine this to work out so that every night, say at 4 
am, after 5 hours of inactivity, VDR scans all channels for EPG data, and 
compiles a new list.
A kind of automatic, volatile seperate timer list could be added for this (or 
incorporated into the existing timer list), which contains automatically 
scheduled timers, that way the external plugin could communicate with VDR via 
telnet to set these timers and manage them, as long as every once in a while 
VDR triggers a new compilation based on new EPG data.

* This one is more of a question. Does the EPG broadcaster specifically sends 
"now playing this show", or is the now-playing information deduced from the 
entire (time-based) EPG schedule? If not the latter, the recording process 
could monitor this information for more accurate recordings? (i.e. less time 
record before and after the show).

* Lastly, if I stick a big heatsink on a pentium 133, will it run cool enough 
as a VDR without a fan? :-)  (sneakily added off-topic question!)

Thanks again for a great program!

Cheers,
Dennis




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