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:

VDR & DVB. BMW & Ph.D.. BEER. YARRR!

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 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.

Terminology:

--------------------------------------------------------------
|## Channel Name ######################### [DD][AR][VF][A][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

DD      - AC-3 stream (optional)
AR      - Aspect Ratio: 1:1/4:3/16:9/2.21:1 (optional)
VF      - Video format: PAL/NTSC (optional)
A       - Audio track: 1..2 (optional)
D       - Device number: 0..3 (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
Right/Left    - Switch to next/previous device that provides the current channel
Green         - Select language (APID)
Back          - Exit plugin

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

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.
- 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.
- Shrinked OSD is available for NTSC users: make NTSC_SYSTEM=1
- The device switching feature is still non-functional.

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