[vdr] Re: split up channels.conf

[Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de>]

Ulrich Petri wrote:
> 
> Rene Bartsch wrote:
> > > I am a strong supporter for splitting it up, because we
> > would finally be
> > able to distribute one unique channel list for all users
> > (incl. cable and
> > terrestrial) and everybody just makes up his own
> > channels.conf by referring
> > to this list.
> >
> > I do agree. As data is getting more and more we should use indexes
> > with unique values only available in one table/file to avaiod multiple
> > entries ("Dritte Normalform" - don't know the english translation at
> > the moment).
> >
> 
> I think it's called normalisation. At least thats what (should be) is
> done with relational db's:
> 
> 1. NEVER use talking (data holding) keys (ZDF = bad; 123 = good)
> 2. NEVER store redundant information (duplicates)
> 3. ALWAYS have an unique key per table (table would mean file in this
> case)
> 
> I agree too that it would be really a gain if we have unique
> identification keys for the channels.

As long as identifying a channel would only be a program internal thing,
a unique key like 12345-23456-34567 would be perfectly acceptable. This is
most likely what's going to happen for relating EPG records to channels.
But IMO towards the user channels have to be numbered 1, 2, 3... - so there you
have another key.

Personally I would never simply throw channels into my channels.conf file.
I manually insert them very carefully, and the sequence of channels in that
file is the sequence (and numbering) I want the channels to appear in. I want
to be able to refer to them as channel 1, channel 2 etc., and I also want to
see _these_ numbers in my timers.conf.

I can imagine inserting channel (and APID) specific audio levels into the
channels.conf format, so there would be no need for "splitting up" things
because of that. So as far as I can see the only thing that's needed would
be a way of marking a channel as "favourite". I could imagine an additional
field in channels.conf that defines whether a channel is a "favourite"
channel or not. If this is a 32 bit integer field, there could even be
32 separate favourite channel lists for different users. VDR could also
be instructed to show only channels marked as "favourite", which could be used
to prevent children from watching channels they are not supposed to watch (please,
no "censorship" thread again - we had that a while ago).

Klaus
-- 
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Klaus Schmidinger                       Phone: +49-8635-6989-10
CadSoft Computer GmbH                   Fax:   +49-8635-6989-40
Hofmark 2                               Email:   kls@cadsoft.de
D-84568 Pleiskirchen, Germany           URL:     www.cadsoft.de
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