Hello,
I get the feeling that 1.4 might be getting close - so I though I should speak up now.
I have a request: find a way to fix transfer mode while using a motorised dish.
I have a dxr3 based system and a motorized dish. The problem is vdr only waits a few seconds (TUNER_LOCK_TIMEOUT set in device.c) before it reports "ERROR: device %d has no lock" and gives up.
This makes it fairly painful. I have to change channel, wait for the dish to move and then go "menu->channels->OK" to re-tune the current channel.
My "Fix" is not to return false after the timeout. This causes vdr to try to set up the filters anyway, and things work fine. When the dish moves the channels just starts to work fine. (If I am not wrong, vdr used to have no timeout here but some cards did not like you to set filters when there was no lock... ?) Setting the timeout to a large value is not an option as vdr is unresponsive during this period, making channel surfing 'stick' at various places where channels are un-available. I cannot think of a fix that preserves the "don't set filters without a lock" behaviour without using another thread.
The other problem with vdr and motorised dishes is due to the timeout for recordings. If vdr receives no data for MAXBROKENTIMEOUT defined in recording.c it does an emergency restart. Now on the plus side, by the time vdr restarts my dish has (so far) always moved to the correct position! However, I must say it is hard to explain to my wife why the recording we just happened to be watching at the time stopped midway through...
Maybe some of this could be fixed by to rotor plugin, however the rotor plugin should not be needed in this setup (I just define things in diseqc.conf). The better fix IMHO would be in vdr itself. I think a parameter that says "maximum timeout when changing source" might help the recording problem. Not so sure for the transfer mode problem.