[vdr] Re: AW: Re: Channelslist

[Marcus Kuba <marcus@kuba4u.de>]

Am 06.10.2001 11:26:16, schrieb Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de>:

>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.

Well.. the last real big change was the one on July, the package-changes this week 
were almost automatically detected without a long search.

>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.

In reality, VDR is used most of the time as a receiver and not for recording (or does 
everybody here have an additional box just for watching TV or switches to DTV for 
viewing? I'm quite sure most of us don't). And so it would be quite useful if in those times 
VDR would be able to dynamically update it's channel-data after switching.
On Premiere, at least the Audio-Pids are very dynamic, especially on the sports-channels 
and the Cinedoms. And there must obviously be more info than just "there are multiple 
audio-channels"... commercial receivers also know the names of the languages/audio-
channels.

>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).

If I understand Rolfs last message right, DTV is able to dynamically update the pids.. so it 
must be possible.

>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...

Nobody says that it must always be done dynamically.. but after tuning with the last 
known/stored values it should be possible to have a look at what's available and then tell 
it the user. Maybe when you display the event-info there could be some sign indicating 
there are multiple audio-channels. And in the main-menu, the green button could be 
labeled with the name (german/english, commentator/stadium...) and only be available 
when multiple pids are really active.


Greetings,    Marcus