[vdr] Re: channels.conf garbage.

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.com>]

Udo Richter wrote:
> Carsten Koch wrote:
>
> > I tried this and it works quite well, but not 100% perfect.
> > Most of my channels.conf entries got rid of the -------- mark 
> > immediately,
> > but strangely, some entries kept the mark even when I tuned to them.
>
> I'm seeing this too. My best guess is that these channels dont get 
> announced, so no name is availabe for them - just a PID. You have to 
> sort them out manually.
>
> BTW:
> I've written a perl script that drives this one step further: The script 
> adds a [yyyymmdd] header to the boquet part of vdr 1.3.x channel names, 
> but only if none is present. This gives a good hint when the channel was 
> last seen, and if you sort the VDR channel list by boquet (key 0), all 
> channels get ordered by last seen date.
> If anyone's interested, I can publish the script.
Sure, I'm interested to try that out.

However, I wonder if a VDR patch would not take us a lot further.
I am thinking along these lines: A channel only has any value to me
if I can watch and/or record its broadcasts. So, when VDR adds a
channel to channels.conf, it should first check if it can receive
any data on its audio and/or video PIDs. If the channel is just
temporarily not broadcasting, it may get added the next time around,
which I believe is acceptable. As long as it does not broadcast any
useful data that is either FTA or descrambable with whatever CAMs
I have, it is only clutter and it should not be added to channels.conf.

So much about adding new channels. Getting rid of recently deceased
channels could be implemented inside VDR along your ideas, with the
added benefit that VDR would mark a channel again based on the fact
that you can watch/record anything from it. VDR could scan all
channels automatically for useful data right before VDR shuts down
due to user inactivity. If a channel has useful data, its "dead"
counter will be cleared. If it does not have useful data, its "dead"
counter will be incremented. As a setup option, one could define
a value of the "dead" counter at which the channel gets automatically
deleted (0=never delete).

Would that be useful?


Carsten.