[vdr] Re: AW: Re: Channelslist

[Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de>]

Rainer Zocholl wrote:
> 
> Carsten.Koch@icem.de(Carsten Koch)  05.10.01 23:25
> 
> Once upon a time Carsten Koch shaped the electrons to say...
> 
> >Rainer Zocholl wrote:
> >....
> >> I think he meant the "PIDs" and a general solution
> >> to get these infos.
> >>
> >> I wonder why those values are not documented by the
> >> satellit companies(SES?). They (must) know them, and these values
> >> can't be "confidential" and under "Non-disclosure" or?
> 
> >Als Rolf said, they are dynamic
> 
> Ok, that would explain why they are not documented ;-)
> (I thought this was only true for PW)

Well, they're not _that_ dynamic. The PIDs for most of the FTA channels
haven't changed in quite a while. Only PW likes to juggle their PIDs
every now and then. And then the PW subscribers have to reconfigure
their D-box, which takes quite a while and is rather annoying.

> >and you really do not need them before you start a program.
> 
> >As an example, DVB2000 (d-box firmware) determines them at
> >run-time, so there is no need to configure them.
> 
> Hm, how do i tell that VDR/program a timer?

I prefer having a complete channel definition in channels.conf, and not
rely on being able to determine the PIDs at runtime. VDR is a *video recorder*,
so you have to know *exactly* which channel (with which PIDs) you are going to
record. That also applies to NVOD channels: you need to know the exact PNR
(or "ServiceID") on which that programme runs at the time you want to record
it. This often referred to "NVOD-linkage" won't help you here.

> >I believe it would be nice if VDR did the same.
> >That would save us the unneccessary hazzle of finding and
> >configuring these somewhat redundant numbers all the time.

I'm not sure if this is widely known, but the driver currently requires
the PIDs to be given, and from them determines the PNR. I don't know why this
is so, but that's the way it is. So in order to tune a channel VDR *has* to give
the driver the PIDs. The PNR is actually only used to filter the correct EPG data
for each channel. Ralph once said that this may change, and the driver may require
the PNR as well (or instead of the PIDs?), but that's currently not the way it
is implemented (if I'm wrong here, please correct me).

And if detecting the PIDs at the time a channel is switched to would in any
way slow down channel switching, I don't think this would be widely appreciated...

I'm not saying that VDR will *never* automatically detect these data, but just
at the moment I don't see the big necessity for such a feature.

Klaus
-- 
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Klaus Schmidinger                       Phone: +49-8635-6989-10
CadSoft Computer GmbH                   Fax:   +49-8635-6989-40
Hofmark 2                               Email:   kls@cadsoft.de
D-84568 Pleiskirchen, Germany           URL:     www.cadsoft.de
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