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.

Description:

DVB Frontend Status Monitor is a plugin that displays a few signal quality parameters
of the tuned channel on your screen. You can zap through all your channels and the
plugin should be monitoring always the right frontend *fingers crossed*. A short
message is shown at the bottom line to help the DVB card identification after each
channel switch and OK press.

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>. Props to Sascha for being brave
enough to test this piece of junk and ofcourse for german translations. The bitrate
calculation algorithm is copied from dvbstream application by Dave Chapman
<dave@dchapman.com>.

Shortcomings / Todo list:

- The current version is a kind of Proof In Concept to replace the old 'tech
  patch', so the internals will be eventually rewritten... if I'll find some
  spare time.
- 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 as well. BTW. the
  same things happens with OSDTeletext plugin too :)