[vdr] How to do a (full) channel scan within VDR?

["Barrera, Inigo" <Inigo.Barrera@eu.sony.com>]

Hello,

we finally have a PC running VDR 1.3.17 (with softdevice 0.0.8) with a
Nova-T card, and we want to pass it through an automated testing equipment
to check if such kind of machine is compliant with the DVB-T Receiver
specification for Spain, as a university graduate research work for a
resident student.

Some of these tests are repeated on different sets of frequency channels, so
we need to somehow re-tune the system between tests. Usually, when we
perform these compliance tests on commercial sets, we just do a full scan
when necessary. But I just don't know how to do this with VDR. The problem
is that all commands from the testing equipment must be triggered through IR
commands, so this re-scan or full scan command should be triggered through
the remote. That means that either there is a direct key for this, or it is
accessible through the menu system.

The first idea was to use the channel update feature for this. I thought of
doing a fake channels.conf file, with all the channels and a fake service
for each one, but I don't really know how the channel update feature is
working so I don't know if several service would be caught in this way (or I
should add a number of fake services for each channel in the file), and
-what is much worse- I don't know how to start the update (or when it
starts). Should it work? Is this feature explained somewhere? (sorry if it
is too basic, but I really couldn't find it)

As other ideas I also thought of using a special script which is calling the
scan from dvb utils after vdr, and use the power-off key as a trigger. Not
so ellegant, though. And I also found a scanner plugin, but (at least the
version I found) it seemed to be updated until vdr 1.1.32. Does anybody know
of another plugin which I could use, in case channel update cannot be used
for this? Or a patch, or anything?

Thank you very much!
Inigo.


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