[vdr] Completely broken

[Tony Houghton <h@realh.co.uk>]

I was getting on quite well today. I compiled 1.3.12 with the xine and
remote plugins, got it working, but decided I'd be better off with the
Debian packages after all, now I had a slightly better understanding.
That worked OK too, I even got runvdr and the init script working nicely
(IIRC - so much has happened since I can't exactly remember whether it
ever did work and stayed working).

Then I tried a different channels.conf and all hell broke loose. I
wanted one with UK Freeview channel numbers. When I generated one with
scan -u before vdr just seemed to ignore the numbers so I used one that
Darren Salt sent me, but I forgot it had frequencies for a different
region. No problem, just restore my old channels.conf. But vdr hasn't
worked properly since.

IIRC the rough sequence of things that happened was that first of all it
wouldn't start at all, xine would just give a black screen. It doesn't
help that for xine, locking up until it gets a KILL signal is perfectly
normal behaviour, and at best it takes at least 5 seconds to close after
pressing q when used with vdr. One of many reasons I wish the plugin had
been written for MPlayer instead.

So I purged the config dirs and reinstalled the packages, reinstalled my
channels.conf etc, and then it would get as far as asking me to press Up
on the remote, but not respond when I did. Eventually I tried my
self-compiled version again, it worked and saved a remote.conf! Then I
tried the Debian version again, OK, even the init script worked when
called manually, great. Until I rebooted, then I basically went back to
square one.

It's just behaving completely randomly, and the only thing that's
consistent is that now the self-compiled version won't work either.
Sometimes runvdr partially works, but calling the vdr binary as user vdr
doesn't, sometimes vice versa. Sometimes it says a few things in syslog,
but nothing much more useful than exiting with code 2 or -1, sometimes
it doesn't log anything. Sometimes it gets stuck asking me to press Up,
sometimes it flashes up "Phase 1, press a key to identify remote" (or
something like that) but immediately goes on to show the picture.
Sometimes it can't select any channels, with a red bar at the bottom
saying "Channel unavailable" or whatever. Sometimes it does about 0.5fps
with no sound - I've had that before, but it would go back to normal if
I restarted xine, but not any more.

I'm sorry I can't give a more detailed report, but I've been too busy
trying to get it to work to keep track of exactly what I was doing and
note down any messages properly. The above description isn't as vague as
it sounds anyway - vdr really is behaving that randomly.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk