[vdr] Re: split up channels.conf

[jhall@UU.NET (Jeremy Hall)]

In the new year, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
> Ulrich Petri wrote:
> > 
> > Rene Bartsch wrote:
> > 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.
> 
Can we agree that your statement could be rephrased:

but IMO towards the user, channels might want to be numbered 1, 2, 3... -
so there you have another key

I think it's important to realize that there are some situations where
channels are appearing and disappearing almost daily.  Because the
condition exists that my favourite channel might be moved without warning,
during the day, and without care to my needs, I need to be able to
autogenerate my channels.conf.  Manually editing the channels through the
GUI or editing the channels.conf by hand is too time consuming for me.

I don't know about other DVB streams, but NAGRA in the US gives me tier as
one of its attributes in the SDT.  I could build a favourites list based
on tier, adding tier to the channels.conf.

Whatever is done in the favourites list needs to be autogeneratable from
the stream, so in this case a channel is uniquely identified by its
service number, transport stream, and original network id.  If this
construct could be used as a key, things get complicated quickly as we try
to interpret that in the program yet display it uniquely for the user.  In
my case where I want to have a unique service identifier for each channel,
I need to keep track of the channel "number" (for Klaus) and the new
service ID for me.  If the user enters some channel number, there has got
to be a way for vdr to come up with all the needed items to perform an EPG
lookup on that channel. (for example the user doesn't know that it's on
transponder 3 with a tsid of 203 and network id 4102) he only knows the
published number.

> 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).
> 
How do you propose autogenerating the favourites field? using the
nagra tier? some other version of a tier?

_J

> Klaus
> -- 
> _______________________________________________________________
> 
> 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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