Hi,

today many TV equipment offers online help, even my remote does ;) VDR currently only gives help by manuals or WIKI, but this is far away every time you need it, i.e. if you whatch TV. So I was wondering if it would be interesting to add online help for VDR with the following requirements:

- a dedicated key should give help in any situations (-> kHelp) - help may be available per OSD item, or - if not present - per OSD menu (e.g. some setup values could give an extra explanation) - help may be available for all player controls (e.g. I'll never keep in mind the keys for the dvd-plugin ;) ) - the implementation should also work for plugins

What do you (especially Klaus) think about an online help?

I've added a quick and dirty patch, that adds the basics for an online help. With the patch the implemenation of an online help works like this:

To add help to an OSD item, simply replace for example

Add(new cMenuEditItem(tr("an osd item"), &data.value));

with

cOsdItem* item = new cMenuEditItem(tr("an osd item"), &data.value); Add(item); item->SetOnlineHelp(tr("Help for item"));

To add help for an OSD menu add the following line to the contructor:

SetOnlineHelp(tr("Help for this menu"));

The same for an object derived from cControl.

Whenever the user presses the 'Help' key he gets a simple text menu with the online help.

I've already added online help to epgsearch's setup previously, but I think it would be better if there was core support in VDR for this and a common implementation.

The patch really needs some refinement (especially the part in vdr.c), but it should only serve as a starting point for a discussion.

BR,

Christian