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 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 OSD setup page before writing any bug reports. - 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."