[linux-dvb] DVB file formats

[Andrew de Quincey]

On Thursday 16 June 2005 13:47, Felix Domke wrote:
> > Is it worth supporting bouquets in the file formats do you think? None of
> > the other formats support them, and from what I've seen of satellite
> > receivers, they don't seem to bother with them much either (although that
> > may admittedly be distorted by Sky's stranglehold on the UK DVB-S
> > market).
>
> Bouquets in term of the BAT are useless, in my eyes, at least with the
> current situation.
>
> On larger-scale networks (like DVB-S), it will never match what the user
> expects.
>
> On smaller ones, like cable networks, it could be an alternative(!) to a
> simple channel list, but as no receiver support them, nobody broadcasts
> them.
>
> The only thing where i ever parsed a BAT was to find out how certain
> receivers find their upgrade streams ;)
>
> I wish bouquets would be functional, but I see no chance here. Sorting
> by provider_name, with some magic to join typos, gives much better results.

This is what I suspected - I've never looked into bouquets in any detail 
myself though.

Besides, bouquets/presets provided by the network providers (even if they were 
usable) would probably not actually correspond to what people really want in 
my experience :)

> There are commercial services which provide something like "bouquet
> files" and care of them. Unfortunately, they are non-free and thus
> couldn't be used in GPL programs (unless we end up with a GPL program
> which can't be used in certain situations). Maybe it's time to build a
> free alternative for it, something like a (managed) Wiki where you can
> build Bouquet lists, assign "channel numbers" (yes, some people resist
> on using channel numbers for zapping. don't ask me why. But it's
> definitely required, but definitely nonsense without some managed
> lists). The resulting bouquets could then be downloaded to the receiver.
>
> They should NOT replace results of scan-lists. I think it's a bad idea
> to save like 4 minutes of time by using prepared lists, which are
> outdated, maybe miss some transponders or are simply wrong.
>
> But the "favourites" (aka "bouquets") could be managed in  a central
> way, maybe with different possibilities for different countries or user
> groups. For example, there could be a "German Free-TV"-Bouquet, which
> has "ProSieben" on 7, "Das Erste" on 1 etc., with the same for other
> countries and their specific needs as well.

Yeah, I agree - keep the presets seperate from the channel listings. Hopefully 
using your other suggestion we can have a "Global Unique Channel ID" so that 
will be possible. A free alternative sounds cool, once we get the file 
formats sorted.

> We should even be able to transmit them over satellite, because they
> aren't really high bandwidth.

Ooh thats an interesting idea!