Hi,
My feature request/idea for SVDRP is for a new command: LSTEZ . The command would send the EPG data zLib compressed. The EPG data can be large (6+ MBytes) and of course zip, zLib, etc can compress the data quite nicely.
The general idea is if some PC based program is used to schedule and setup VDR timers, then it would need full access to VDR's EPG. I'd like to try and get TV Browser (tvbrowser.org) to grab it's EPG data directly from VDR. This way there is no redundant EPG info in that program.
My idea is to either write a plug-in for TV Browser, or a small C program that grabs the EPG data from VDR and parses it into a format TV Browser can understand. There is a plug-in for TV Browser called "Lazy Bones" which can apparently set/read timer information from VDR already, so most of the hard work is already done.
For those curious why I'm even bothering, given there is something like vdradmin-am...I have setup vdradmin-am recently, and while it has a very polished UI and has *excellent* features, I find it runs very slowly on my desktop PC (Firefox, 2.2 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM) when I access "Timeline" or "Playing Today?" It also uses ~200MB+ RAM on the VDR box.
Featurewise, I wish vdradmin-am had was a "conflict resolution" where if two or more timers are set and they conflict, vdradmin-am searches for alternates of the conflicting program(s) and tries to schedule the program(s) automatically to be recorded at different non-conflicting times, and informs the user, etc.
I figure to implement my feature suggestion and operate more quickly, a PC based program is needed.
The TV Browser site details their EPG format, but unfortunately the program is written in Java and I currently only know C. If there are any Java programmers lurking about and interested in working on this, please contact me.
Thanks for listening. CR.
For those curious why I'm even bothering, given there is something like vdradmin-am...I have setup vdradmin-am recently, and while it has a very polished UI and has *excellent* features, I find it runs very slowly on my desktop PC (Firefox, 2.2 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM) when I access "Timeline" or "Playing Today?" It also uses ~200MB+ RAM on the VDR box.
You're right, Perl is awfully slow. Setting up an autotimer lasts over 5 minutes on my VIA EPIA-5000!
Have you ever thought about integrating the VDRadmin functions as plugins?
You could create a generic HTTP-Plugin for VDR providing an extended OSD which can display more objects by higher resolution.
Input capturing (keyboard/mouse) and getting the resolution of the browser can be done by JavaScript.
That way you can create plugins using all the fast interface functions of VDR and the generic HTTP plugin for Input/Output. Then it's easy to add VDRadmins functions plugin by plugin without doing everything twice.
And if you wanna play God, you could even play tv/recordings on the client by starting the client's media player embedded in the browser ;-)
Renne