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 originally 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 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
  the ElchiAIO4a+ patch to maximize the *wow* effect :)