[mythtv] DVB Development

[Kenneth Aafløy]

Giddiup!

Pretty general subject, I know. Basically what I want to bring forth is who is 
working on what feature, because there has been some people that have claimed 
to be working on features like autopid, scan and epg. However I have not seen 
any further mails about this subject, and I'm wondering about wether these 
features is in progress or not?

I've been working a little on a parsing library for dvb tables and 
descriptors, so that scan/autopid/epg features can be implemented with very 
simple code on top of this parsing library/code. This code is essentially 
developed for another project, but it has no external dependencies, is 
released under the gpl, and so is easily portable into for example mythtv. 
Now, if nobody is working on the forementioned features, I would like to 
import this library into mythtv, and base all other dvb features upon it. 
This would however require a final restructuring of the dvb database 
parameters, as the library handles parsing of dvb tables from the dvb network 
it would be cleaner to make the internal storage in mythtv like what is in 
the network. This adds another dependency if you want to call it that, in 
that all tuning information will be stored in a binary format, and will not 
allow easy editing without thoroug knowledge about the inner workings about 
dvb descriptors. When this is done it will contain features such as autoscan 
with empty tables, which will try to do a step by step tuning (if no direct 
source is configured). Once the dvb code gets a lock on a frequency it will 
start scanning for other channels available from the network information 
table. When channel tables are filled the code will enter an update state, so 
that every time a channel is tuned into, it will, in the background, reload 
and check the information in the database for consistency. Any new channels 
will be added and channels that is no longer existing in the dvb information 
will be removed, and only tv channels will be treated in this process, in 
other words any channel that does not have at least on audio pid and one 
video pid will be treated as bogus. What basically the autopid feature will 
do is pick the highest pids from a prioritylist of languages, so that tv 
channels will always be output with your default languange if it exist or any 
other available language if not (english beeing a preffered language if no 
other is set or found, this could also be made a configurable). On the 
subject of epg, I have not been able to extract anything other than now/next 
information about the current program/other program on the same transponder. 
I know for a fact that vdr does this without a hitch (but also has a 
dependency xmltv just in case), and I have not looked at how vdr gathers this 
information. If anybody knows how to gather epg data from a satellite or 
other dvb source, I would greatly appreaciate the contribution, and use more 
time on this project than I have done in the last months.

If there is anything in here you belive that I have come short to think of, or 
have anything to add/clearify to this statement, please reply to this post to 
the mythtv-dev at mythtv.org list and not to my personal e-mail account,
plainly because my e-mail used on this list has been so cluttered with so much
spam that I rearly catch any personal e-mails at all (why don't someone fix 
this bug?).

-- 
Kenneth *

* Looking forward to the day I can contribute to the Linux Community!