[vdr] 'Fake' FTA channels impossible to tune

[Klaus Schmidinger]

Carsten Koch wrote:
> Luca Olivetti wrote:
> 
>> VDR doesn't let you switch to a channel that you cannot decrypt. I 
>> usually like this feature, so I won't switch to a channel I cannot 
>> see, but today some channels at 28.5E are FTA (a sky promotion or a 
>> technical glitch?), even if they have a caid!=0, so I had to modify 
>> cDvbDevice::ProvidesCa to alway return true. I know that sky's to 
>> blame (or maybe they just don't want to advertise their channels as 
>> FTA), but maybe it should be a configurable option.
> 
> 
> I strongly agree that the current mechanism is theoretically a good
> idea but works poorly in practise.
> 
> 1) Many channels have a caid=0, but when you tune to them,
>    all you see is a black screen.
>    Maybe they transmit only rarely or they are in fact
>    encrypted, but do not set the proper caid.
> 
> 2) When you have a certain cam, it does not mean that you can
>    always receive *all* channels supported by its ID.
>    So you will have even more "dead" channels in your channels.conf.
> 
> 3) Channels may broadcast unencrypted in spite of caid!=0 (see above).
> 
> 4) If you do not have any cam, you tend to get a huge channels.conf
>    with mostly unusable garbage in it.
> 
> What I would *love* to see is the following feature:
>   Every time VDR does an EPG scan, it reads from the channel it just
>   switched to. If there are no data within a few seconds, it increments
>   a number in the channel entry, if there are data, it clears this
>   number. If the number exceeds a configurable threshold, the
>   channel entry is deleted.
>   Before adding new channels to channels.conf, VDR switches to the
>   channel and reads from it. If there are no data within a few seconds,
>   it does not add it.
> 
> With this feature, only interesting new channels (like the ones you
> observed above) would appear at the end of channels.conf, inactive
> channels would disappear automatically after a while and the whole
> channels.conf would stay a lot cleaner and more manageable.

Sounds like a good thing to do in a plugin - way too complex for the VDR core ;-)

Klaus