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!

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 information is also available in advanced display mode. User can
switch between simple and advanced 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 <sascha@akv-soft.de>
and Andreas Regel <andreas.regel@powarman.de>. The bitrate calculation algorithm
originates from the 'dvbstream' application by Dave Chapman <dave@dchapman.com>.

Shortcomings / Todo list / Notes:

- The current version is a kind of Proof In Concept to replace the old 'tech
  patch', and it's now eating many unnecessary cpu clock cycles - this will be
  fixed later...
- 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 :)
- The plugin GUI is designed for _small fonts_, so stable vdr-1.2.6 users should
  consider a small font patch (e.g. ElchiAIO4a) to maximize the visual effect :)
- The stream information is still missing.
- Disable bitrate calculation to speed up heavy zapping sessions.