Final report for DVB Manager

[Sebastian Pölsterl <marduk k-d-w org>]

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Blog post at http://k-d-w.org/node/55

Another Summer of Code for GNOME will end soon. As you probably know my
task was to write a DVB Manager.

Last week I was able to add an option to do a brute force scan for DVB-T
(shamelessly stolen from Zaheer's code). In addition, I was finally able
to work on the EPG part. When you record a show the name and description
of the currently running show at the beginning of the recording is
associated with the recording. Each channel has a Schedule associated
with it that contains a sorted list of events (shows) from EPG.

Although, it basically works and is accessible through D-Bus I'm not
happy how EPG data is currently collected. Currently, I'm iterating over
all channels, tune to each of them and store the EPG data I receive.
Especially, for satellite this takes a lot of time. Furthermore, during
the scan the DVB card can't be used to watch TV or record shows. E.g.
when you watch TV with Totem for some time, dvb-daemon won't be able to
collect EPG data. I honestly have no idea how one can avoid this problem.

On the UI part I improved the UI to manage timers. It will now show a
red dot when an recording is currently active and the UI will update
when timers are added or removed.

Nevertheless, dvb-daemon isn't that bad. What currently works well is:

    * Recording with manually provided start time and duration
    * Automatically distribute overlapping recordings between adapters
of same group
    * Scan for channels
    * Browse already recorded shows
    * UI to scan for channels
    * UI to configure devices
    * UI to create and delete timers

Despite that GSoC ends I'm going to continue working on dvb-daemon.
There are couple of items on my to do list:

    * store EPG that it doesn't get lost when the daemon is stopped
    * schedule recording from EPG
    * record multiple shows on same transport stream at the same time
with a single adapter
    * Better integrate into UPnP world
    * Recognize when recorded show is deleted manually and not by the daemon
    * Write radio plugin for Rythmbox
    * Better integrate with Totem
    * Search EPG

Last but not least, I have to do a tarball release. I'm currently
waiting for a bug in mpegtsparse to be fixed. One's it's fixed I'm going
to do a proper release.

For the brave and impatient::
bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~sebp/bzr/dvb-daemon

- --
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl
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