vdr/PLUGINS/src/sky

This is a "plugin" for the Video Disk Recorder (VDR).

Written by:                  Klaus Schmidinger <kls@cadsoft.de>

Project's homepage:          www.cadsoft.de/vdr

Latest version available at: www.cadsoft.de/vdr

See the file COPYING for license information.

Description:

The 'sky' plugin implements a new device for VDR, which is based on the
MPEG2 encoder card described at linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml. It
allows you to connect the analog a/v output of your Sky Digibox to VDR,
so that you can enjoy the full recording flexibility of VDR with your
Sky subscription. Note that this is NOT something that does anything
illegal, like decrypting the Sky programme without a subscription. You
will need a Sky Digibox and a valid subscription in order to use this
plugin.

The 'kfir' module must be loaded with the option 'streamtype=4' to make it
produce a Transport Stream.

The Digibox is remotely controlled through VDR via LIRC (see lirc.org).
The file lircd.conf.sky contains the remote control codes necessary to
control the Digibox.

In order to access the Sky channels VDR needs to know the channel number
under which each channel is stored in the Sky Digibox. These numbers are
used as 'frequency' parameters in the channels.conf definitions of the Sky
channels (see the file 'channels.conf.sky'). Since these numbers are always
less than 1000, they can be easily distinguished from normal satellite
transponder frequencies. The VPID is 160 and the APID is 80 for all Sky
channels. These are just fake PIDs, since the Kfir card always uses these
fixed PIDs. The 'Ca' parameter of the Sky channels is set to 301, which
is defined as "Videoguard, Sky Digital" in VDR's 'ca.conf' file. Again, please
note that VDR doesn't do any decrypting here, this is just to mark these
channels as "conditionally accessible" and have a way of setting the CICAM
value for the Kfir device in VDR's Setup menu.

The Sky EPG is available on the Internet at http://www.ananova.com.
The Perl script getskyepg.pl extracts the EPG data from these pages
and sends it to VDR via an SVDRP connection. The channel numbers Sky
uses to generate the EPG pages are stored as the 'sid' parameter in
the channels.conf definitions of the Sky channels. You can keep your
EPG data up-to-date by entering a call to getskyepg.pl into your
/etc/crontab. Call 'getskyepg.pl -h' for a list of options.
The getskyepg.pl script requires the programs /usr/bin/wget and /usr/bin/logger
to be installed on your system.