I have a couple of ideas that might be handy in VDR.
A) left/right arrow key annoyance
In my setup, update from 1.3.38 to 1.3.39 changed the behaviour of <- -> keys: before, they searched through the channel list "headings" or "section marks" (they begin with a colon in channels.conf). Now the left/right arrow keys change the output volume! Aaargh, I have separate keys for that in my Hauppauge remote and furthermore, volume adjustment in VDR does nothing since I use the digital PCM output to my amplifier. I bet there is a way to configure this to behave like it should. How?
B) channel list views
Since I have some 2400+ channels available, from 5 different satellites, I am a relatively happy user of the channelsort plugin, just to keep all my channels in decent order. (that is, S1.0W, S5.0E, S13.0E, S19.2E and S28.2E)
Now, because of different "pay" channels etc. I can either group the channels according to some automatic criteria or sort them out strictly by hand by putting "my" favourite channels to the beginning of list and only let autosort take care of the rest.
I think it would be most convenient to have e.g. 10 different "views" to the channel list. So that I can
1) in the channel list view, decide which channel groups a particular channel belongs to.
2) in the channel view, easily switch from the "all channels" view to any of the other views.
3) browse channels up/down in the live view, only in the channels that belong to the currently selected "channel list view".
4) it would be very handy to be able to define some rules (regexp channel name, regexp provider name, source, CA value etc.) for some views and the list/view is updated dynamically.
Sorting the channel list is one way, but different users in a family may want to see different sorting of the channels, for example. One solution might be to simply allow duplicate entries in channels.conf, but I think this restriction has been made for a reason.
For example, I like to have my channel list sorted according to the satellite and free/pay (ca) value, and tv/radio separately, of course. Still I would like to have a sublist of all the different music channels that I have available. There are plenty of them... News channels are another list etc.
Someone (other than me) may similarly want to have a list of all the sports channels. This is where we come to different VDR users in the same family. :)
I am using the word "view" here as like the views in SQL databases. The data is not duplicated, but you may have different selections of the lines that may be read like a real table.
C) access rights
Some others have come up with similar ideas.
There might be some kind of user levels in VDR, by a pin code for example. It is easily entered with a remote.
On a "guest" level, only certain channels, recordings and timers are visible and modifiable. In "supervisor" mode, channels (and channel views, see above) may be flagged as limited visibility, and they can not be seen in guest level. Same goes with recordings and timers.
-sjm