On Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:47:14 +0200 Pasi Juppo Pasi@Juppo.fi wrote:
Few comments/suggestions to boxstar: -roadmap: boxtar itself does not seem to show EPG unless it is incorporated into manage timers and recordings. Anyhow, I really hope you implement TVOnScreen type of EPG viewer and similar EPG search
Yes, I want to be able to present the EPG in at least two ways, both in boxstar's frontend and in a web frontend. One way is like many TVs and STBs and vdr-admin's "Timeline" with the channels vertically on the left and the programmes in horizontal strips, the other is a vertical list of programmes for a single channel like VDR's "Schedule" and vdr-admin's "Channels" view. I do want to provide EPG searching too although I've never got round to enabling that plugin in VDR.
-plugin for automated timers.
Do you mean automatically record programmes with the same title? That's a feature I'd like to have too, and features I'd like have a good chance of making it in :).
I'm not really thinking in terms of "plugins" though, one of the things I dislike about VDR is having to find and compile plugins separately apart from a few core ones available in Debian. If and when it gets popular enough for people to want to add their own features I'll probably have to provide a mechanism to extend boxstar without the core code having to be altered to accommodate each extension, but it'll be easier in python than C++, and I'll encourage them to be hosted on the main boxstar site or at least have a CMS where people can add links etc.
-OSD: not much is said about that but I hope it will scale according to the resolution and be full-coloured.
Yes, once "hvid" is fully developed. In the meantime video playing will stay mainly based around mplayer so the OSD will be limited to things like showing the channel number when the user changes it.
-I assume that boxstar is developed to be full client-server solution which allows multiple fully independent clients.
Yes.
What would be nice addition because of the today's motherboards is that bostar-daemon could be run on multiple PCs for single system. This would allow to use cheap mATX boards that have one or two PCI slots to build a massive (?) system of e.g. 6 DVB cards. Some kind of master server might be needed for centralized recordings, timers etc.
I hadn't really thought about going that far. The basic principle isn't too difficult, but it makes configuration more difficult, especially as one of the problems I want to solve is being able to configure boxstar to know the relationships between channels such as "BBC ONE" on DVB-T being equivalent to "BBC 1 South" (in my case) on DVB-S so that if I want to set overlapping timers I can just choose "BBC 1" and boxstar will automatically choose whichever card isn't already committed to another timer - like VDR can already do if both cards are the same type. Obviously it will be possible to assign priorities to cards. Managing these equivalencies and priorities across more than one PC could get very complicated.
Hopefully Linux will support PCI-E cards with multiple tuners soon, and with PCI being phased out and assuming you can plug a PCI-E x1 card into a x16 slot while using onboard graphics, it should eventually be possible to have 4 such cards in one PC. But then you'd probably need an array of 10k rpm SAS HDs to keep up with recording from them all!