Re: One channel - multiple sources

[Sebastian Pölsterl <sebp k-d-w org>]

Am 15.10.2009 10:03, schrieb Michał Sawicz:
> Hi there,
Hi Michał,

> I once thought about this thing - you can have multiple sources of the
> same channel, from different providers (DVB-S, DVB-T, DVB-C) and even
> the same channel in SD and HD.
>
> Such channels should not be visible by the end user - you should be able
> to have a unique list of channels without really being aware of where
> they come from, and the daemon should choose one of the sources for this
> channel.
>
> I think a way for this could be to have a tree of channels where only
> the first level would be presented to the user. The 'parent' channel IMO
> should be a virtual one so that you can move the child channels around
> (changing priority) without messing the groups etc. I realize a 'tree'
> of just two levels is a bit overkill, maybe a simple one-to-many
> relationship would suffice, but it's required to keep the priorities of
> the channels (i.e. DVB-S HD, DVB-T HD, DVB-S SD, DVB-T SD etc.).
>
> The daemon would then try to find first available source to record /
> stream this channel, without the user even noticing. It should also be
> possible, though, to try and force using some other source (say, you
> want to record something but want to make sure it's in HD), maybe even a
> multiselection of sources (taking the above example into account -
> select DVB-S HD and DVB-T HD for a certain recording). Here the
> priorities would be used again. An empty list of preferred sources would
> mean 'try all sources'. If no preferred source isn't available at a
> given time (say, it's busy), the user should be notified about it, and
> it should try recording from other sources.
>
> I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

I had the same idea when I started this project. It sounds really good 
from a user's point of view. However, I think it's not easy to implement 
this. The problem is how can you determine that two broadcasts from two 
different sources are actually the same channel. The simplest way would 
be by channel name, but in case of DVB-S where some channels have the 
same name but are actually different channels this fails. Maybe 
considering the channels' network as well would increase the chance to 
find the correct channels.

I can't really think of a suited solution to defer this kind of 
relationships automatically. Of course, if you have a manually created 
list of relationships you can do all of the above. But then again, most 
users won't create the list manually, it must be shipped with dvb 
daemon. Regarding all the different locations and sources this sounds 
like a cumbersome task, too.

The idea sounds great, but I think it's currently too much work to get 
this done, especially because I'm the only developer.

--
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl