vdr-plugin-femon/README

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

Written by:                  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/

See the file COPYING for license information.

Requirements:

Ph.D. in Astro Physics and preferably a six-pack waiting in a fridge.
Never trust a Klingon. "Qu'vaD lI' De'vam". Beam me up, Scotty!
You're number six! I'm number two.

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.
User can switch between different display modes by pressing 'OK' key.

The plugin is based on a neat console frontend status monitor application called 
'femon' by Johannes Stezenbach <js@convergence.de> (see DVB-apps/szap/femon.c
for further information). The other parts of plugin code are borrowed from the 
excellent 'OSD Picture-In-Picture' plugin by Sascha Volkenandt and Andreas Regel.
The bitrate calculation algorithm originates from the 'dvbstream' application by
Dave Chapman and the stream information routines from the 'libdvb' library by
Metzler Brothers.

Shortcomings / Todo list / Important Notes:

- The plugin supports only those DVB cards with _one_ frontend (do any cards
  with multiple frontends even exist?), because I haven't yet figured howto do
  it without patching the VDR core.
- Sometimes (read always) ttxtsubs plugin messes up the OSD - user should disable
  ttxtsubs, but closing and reopening the femon plugin might help temporarily as
  well. Btw., this same thing happens with OSDTeletext plugin too :)
- Disable the stream analyze to speed up heavy zapping sessions.
- If you're using VDR version 1.3.6 or older, you'll have to stick with femon-0.0.4!