[vdr] Heartbeat for VDR

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

Hi all,

Our VDR box has two leds that I use to indicate "recording in progress"
and "VDR is on". However I'd like to make one led flash when VDR has died
for some reason, or the stream has been broken, actually for anything that
would require a restart.

Flashing the led is easy, as is restarting VDR. The harder part is to get
some kind of "heartbeat" from VDR so that my plugin/patch knows that VDR
is alive and healthy. What would be a good place to put in such a probe? A
normal plugin has the Housekeeping() method, but it is not guaranteed to
be called regularly. I'd like to be able to be notified/probe maybe once a
minute or something like that.

One solution could be to create a device and attach it to the stream? That
would let my plugin get notified often enough, and it would just skip the
data and do nothing with it. What happens for a broken stream? Does the
attached device still get called with null data?

Or is there some much better way of doing this? The main idea is to have
the plugin/patch somehow write out a timestamp that an external app can
monitor, and when the timestamp is too old VDR is assumed dead and will be
restarted.

Any comments?

-- 
           "Right, you bastards, you're... you're geography"
                                         -- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!



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