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

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 more 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
stored in the file 'channels.conf.sky', together with the channel IDs as
derived from the actual channel data and the names under which the EPG
data for each channel can be found (see below). Copy this file to your
plugins config directory, in a subdirectory named 'sky', as in

/video/plugins/sky/channels.conf.sky

The Sky EPG is available on the Internet at http://www.bleb.org.
The Perl script getskyepg.pl extracts the EPG data from these pages
and sends it to VDR via an SVDRP connection. The channel names as
used on the bleb.org pages are defined in the channels.conf.sky file.
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.