vdr-plugin-femon/README

This is a DVB Frontend Status Monitor plugin for the Video Disk Recorder (VDR).

Written by:                  Rolf Ahrenberg
                             < R o l f . A h r e n b e r g @ s c i . f i >

Project's homepage:          http://www.saunalahti.fi/~rahrenbe/vdr/femon/

Latest version available at: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~rahrenbe/vdr/femon/

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
See the file COPYING for license information.

Requirements:

VDR and a DVB card.

Description:

DVB Frontend Status Monitor is a plugin that displays some signal information
parameters of the current tuned channel on OSD. You can zap through all your
channels and the plugin should be monitoring always the right frontend. The
transponder and stream information are also available in advanced display modes.

The plugin is based on a neat console frontend status monitor application
called 'femon' by Johannes Stezenbach (see DVB-apps/szap/femon.c for further
information). The bitrate calculation trick originates from the 'dvbstream'
application by Dave Chapman and the stream information routines are taken from
the 'libdvb' library by Metzler Brothers. The H.264 parsing routines are taken
from vdr-xineliboutput plugin by Petri Hintukainen.

Terminology:

--------------------------------------------------------------
|## Channel Name ################### [SVDRP][AR][VF][A/DD][D]|
|[=====Signal Strength in % ==============|=================]|
|[=====Signal-to-Noise Ratio in % ========|=================]|
| STR: #0000 (0%)       BER: #00000000       Video: 0 Mbit/s |
| SNR: #0000 (0%)       UNC: #00000000       Audio: 0 kbit/s |
| [LOCK]     [SIGNAL]     [CARRIER]     [VITERBI]     [SYNC] |
--------------------------------------------------------------

STR     - Signal strength
SNR     - Signal-to-noise ratio
BER     - Bit error rate
UNC     - Uncorrected blocks
Video   - Calculated video bitrate in Mbit/s
Audio   - Calculated audio / AC-3 bitrate in kbit/s

LOCK    - Everything's working...
SIGNAL  - Found something above the noise level
CARRIER - Found a DVB signal
VITERBI - FEC (forward error correction) is stable
SYNC    - Found sync bytes

SVDRP   - SVDRP connection active (optional)
AR      - Aspect Ratio: 1:1/4:3/16:9/2.21:1 (optional)
VF      - Video format: PAL/NTSC (optional)
A/DD    - Audio (0..N) / AC-3 track (optional)
D       - Device number: 0..N (optional)

Controls:

ChanUp/ChanDn - Switch channel up/down
Up/Down       - Switch channel up/down
0-9           - Select channel
Ok            - Switch between display modes: basic, transponder, stream, AC-3
Green         - Select next audio track
Yellow        - Select audio channel: stereo, mono left, mono right
Back          - Exit plugin
Left/Right    - Switch to next/previous device that provides the current channel

Installation:

cd /put/your/path/here/VDR/PLUGINS/src
tar -xzf /put/your/path/here/vdr-femon-X.Y.Z.tgz
ln -s femon-X.Y.Z femon
cd /put/your/path/here/VDR
make
make plugins
./vdr -P femon

Client-server architecture:

The SVDRP service extension can be used in client-server configurations.
A streamdev based VDR-to-VDR streaming client can retrieve frontend
information from a server, if the SVDRP service has been activated and
properly configured in femon. The svdrpservice plugin is required on the
VDR client.

If the client fails to open a DVB card frontend corresponding to the
current receiving device, it will connect to the SVDRP server, look for
the femon plugin and tune the channel on the server to the one currently
viewed on the client. If one of these steps fails, the femon OSD won't
open on the client. An SVDRP icon in the femon title bar indicates that
the data source is SVDRP. The device number in the title bar is always
the local device number.

Notes:

- The plugin supports only those DVB cards with _one_ frontend, because I
  haven't yet figured howto do it without patching the VDR core.

- Disable the stream analyze to speed up heavy zapping sessions.

- The signal strength and signal-to-noise ratio values are comparable only
  between the same brand/model frontends. Due to the lack of proper frontend
  specifications those values cannot be calculated into any real units.

- If the OSD isn't visible, you've configured the OSD height too big or too
  small. Please, try to adjust the variable on the setup page before writing
  any bug reports. NTSC users should use a shrinked default OSD height by
  modifying VDR's setup.conf: femon.OSDHeight = 420

- If the SVDRP service is used: femon won't notice if the server is tuned
  to a different channel and tuning the channel on the server might annoy
  people watching live TV. In some situations the server will refuse
  switching to the requested channel. On a headless server you can avoid
  this by installing the dummydevice plugin.

"Femon - A real womon who lives according to her natural feminine inclinations."