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 ########################## [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 AR - Aspect Ratio: 1:1/4:3/16:9/2.21:1 (optional) VF - Video format: PAL/NTSC (optional) A/DD - Audio (0..5) / AC-3 track (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 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 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. - 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. - There's a shrinked default OSD height 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."