Hello,
[This email has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks. Today I had the courage to send it.]
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
Being a frequent user of freesat channels myself and being a member of the developers behind the yaVDR distribution (www.yavdr.org), I would like to offer to you to open up an English language community forum on our yaVDR board located at forum.yavdr.com [1]. This board is currently mostly used by our development team for internal discussions, so there is not much to see there for external visitors yet.
Please don't get me wrong: I don't want to drag away developer discussions from this mailing list, it's more a forum where developers and users who share the same topics (freesat/freeview/SKY_UK) can communicate and solve problems related to VDR together. And knowledge could be made more accessible for new VDR users.
Maybe this could also be a good starting point for building up an English language VDR user community forum - starting off with UK/Ireland users. I always thought an English language community was missing next to the German language VDR portal (www.vdr-portal.de [2]).
If some of you guys here are interested in such a place, please give me a short reply. It only takes me a couple of minutes to set up a new area on the forum. Or is there already a forum in place?
Regards, Henning
Links: ------ [1] http://forum.yavdr.com [2] http://www.vdr-portal.de
On 05/05/11 10:38, Henning Pingel wrote:
Hello,
[This email has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks. Today I had the courage to send it.]
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
Being a frequent user of freesat channels myself and being a member of the developers behind the yaVDR distribution (www.yavdr.org), I would like to offer to you to open up an English language community forum on our yaVDR board located at forum.yavdr.com http://forum.yavdr.com. This board is currently mostly used by our development team for internal discussions, so there is not much to see there for external visitors yet.
Please don't get me wrong: I don't want to drag away developer discussions from this mailing list, it's more a forum where developers and users who share the same topics (freesat/freeview/SKY_UK) can communicate and solve problems related to VDR together. And knowledge could be made more accessible for new VDR users.
Maybe this could also be a good starting point for building up an English language VDR user community forum - starting off with UK/Ireland users. I always thought an English language community was missing next to the German language VDR portal (www.vdr-portal.de http://www.vdr-portal.de).
If some of you guys here are interested in such a place, please give me a short reply. It only takes me a couple of minutes to set up a new area on the forum. Or is there already a forum in place?
If that is the case, can you add a US / ATSC / PVRInput section too. I get the feeling there are only three people using VDR in the US.. :-) Although it could be good to share..
Am Donnerstag, den 05.05.2011, 11:01 +0200 schrieb Rob Davis rob@davis-family.info:
On 05/05/11 10:38, Henning Pingel wrote:
Hello,
[This email has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks. Today I had the courage to send it.]
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
Being a frequent user of freesat channels myself and being a member of the developers behind the yaVDR distribution (www.yavdr.org), I would like to offer to you to open up an English language community forum on our yaVDR board located at forum.yavdr.com http://forum.yavdr.com. This board is currently mostly used by our development team for internal discussions, so there is not much to see there for external visitors yet.
Please don't get me wrong: I don't want to drag away developer discussions from this mailing list, it's more a forum where developers and users who share the same topics (freesat/freeview/SKY_UK) can communicate and solve problems related to VDR together. And knowledge could be made more accessible for new VDR users.
Maybe this could also be a good starting point for building up an English language VDR user community forum - starting off with UK/Ireland users. I always thought an English language community was missing next to the German language VDR portal (www.vdr-portal.de http://www.vdr-portal.de).
If some of you guys here are interested in such a place, please give me a short reply. It only takes me a couple of minutes to set up a new area on the forum. Or is there already a forum in place?
If that is the case, can you add a US / ATSC / PVRInput section too. I get the feeling there are only three people using VDR in the US.. :-) Although it could be good to share..
Rob, thanks for your suggestion.
I share your view that it would be perfect to have a big English language forum for international VDR users with regional sections for user groups with the same problems. Until today I'm still very unsure if I want to volunteer in offering such a big forum because it consumes quite a lot of time in maintaing it (moderation, deleting spam messages, updating board software, making backups, throw out malicious hackers, hosting + making sure it's available and fast). But you can be sure that we have discussed the idea of an international forum several times within the yaVDR team and always came to the conclusion not to open up a big forum.
I was looking for a way to offer an English language forum and at the same time keep the maintenance workload for me relatively low so that I'm able to still help out with developing new yaVDR features.
I'm still of the opinion that a real full-blown English language forum for VDR is too much responsibility and too time-consuming for me next to maintaining the yaVDR website and yaVDR documentation. But because of my personal interest for the UK channels and the amount of new ideas and patches around a UK "flavoured" VDR here on this mailing list, I made this offer.
Alternatively, I would ale be very happy if somebody else would volunteer and open up a full-blown international English language VDR forum. Then the yaVDR team could also slip into that forum with a yaVDR section.
That's my current point of view and that makes me hesitate to open up a VDR forum that is not limited in any way (by topics or region). I hope you understand my point. Basically, as soon as I'm convinced that there are other people seriously interested in supporting an international English language forum I might reconsider my point of view.
There are other thoughts regarding the goal of a forum that I will put into the answers to the other people who replied.
Regards, Henning
On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Henning Pingel henning@henningpingel.de wrote:
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
I think its a great idea. There must be a fair number of English VDR users out there (I'm one of them!) and I've always found the lack of UK based support and discussion frustrating and whilst the German users are pretty helpful on vdrportal, I get the feeling they get frustrated with us asking questions that have been answered in German previously that we can't search for!
I think if you widen it up too much it'll never happen or become watered down and MythTV already has a lot of English-based support. I'd suggest keeping it narrow to English speaking VDR users (or yaVDR at a push, which I do now use and its as stable now for me after a lot of config as using a FF card or my previous Reel eHD) and of course we can then cover UK channel logos and red button support etc in there as a subset. VDR Portal IMHO would be the ideal location if we can consider asking them to open an area for us.
I'd be happy to help and contribute.
Thanks,
Morfsta
PS - for those waiting for rotor-ng, its still on my to do list to finish off. A combination of holiday and high work load has meant that I've not had a lot of time to look at it recently. I may release an alpha release of it as it is for those that are waiting if there is any demand for it? It has been stable in my box for a few months now.
On Thu, 05 May 2011 17:38:42 +0200 Henning Pingel henning@henningpingel.de wrote:
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
Being a frequent user of freesat channels myself and being a member of the developers behind the yaVDR distribution (www.yavdr.org), I would like to offer to you to open up an English language community forum on our yaVDR board located at forum.yavdr.com [1]. This board is currently mostly used by our development team for internal discussions, so there is not much to see there for external visitors yet.
I'd be interested. But I wonder whether it would be appropriate to allow discussion of UK specifics in other software too eg mythtv. Ultimately VDR doesn't quite suit my needs due to its poor support for viewing across a network, while mythtv's setup tool always makes me give up in disgust. That's why I started boxstar, but it might be a very long time before it becomes usable in its own right.
Am Donnerstag, den 05.05.2011, 18:16 +0200 schrieb Tony Houghton h@realh.co.uk:
On Thu, 05 May 2011 17:38:42 +0200 Henning Pingel henning@henningpingel.de wrote:
I would like to offer to you to open up an English language community forum on our yaVDR board located at forum.yavdr.com [1]. This board is currently mostly used by our development team for internal discussions, so there is not much to see there for external visitors yet.
I'd be interested. But I wonder whether it would be appropriate to allow discussion of UK specifics in other software too eg mythtv. Ultimately VDR doesn't quite suit my needs due to its poor support for viewing across a network, while mythtv's setup tool always makes me give up in disgust. That's why I started boxstar, but it might be a very long time before it becomes usable in its own right.
Hi Tony,
I actually didn't know about boxstar until now. Thanks for pointing that out to me!
In an ideal world there would be a linuxtv.org forum with section for VDR and MythTV, boxstar, TVHeadend and applications like Kaffeine, etc. This is IMHO really needed as an orientation for people who want to use Linux as a PVR.
IMHO the focus of a sub-forum hosted on forum.yavdr.com would be on VDR (and not necessarily yaVDR). And this is also for the reason that the people offering the forum should have some clue about the topics within the forum and we (the yaVDR team) don't have expert knowledge about non-VDR PVR projects like MythTV. On the other hand, I would love to see somebody experienced creating detailed comparison tables for VDR, MythTV, boxstar, TVHeadend and so on. Because every new user wants orientation on his way to the right linux-based TV application.
But if you open up a forum focussed on "Linux-based PVRs in the UK" we would join your forum and open up a yaVDR section in there. ;-)
The underlying reason for offering a forum for me is my hope that the quality and amount of developer related and end-user related documentation available regarding VDR might improve (especially the English language documentation which is IMHO behind the German language documentation). This might be a very idealistic hope based on my view that structured documentation written by the users of an open source product might come into existence easier if a forum is in place. So my main goal would be to offer a place that motivates people to collect documentation in a structured way. A Wiki could replace a forum but I don't know if a Wiki works without a community behind it.
In the German language vdr-portal.de it is the case sometimes that the same questions get asked and answered over and over again because they are not documented (or they are documented but hidden in a heap of unstructured documentation).
Regards, Henning
On Fri, 06 May 2011 10:39:16 +0200 Henning Pingel henning@henningpingel.de wrote:
I actually didn't know about boxstar until now. Thanks for pointing that out to me!
In an ideal world there would be a linuxtv.org forum with section for VDR and MythTV, boxstar, TVHeadend and applications like Kaffeine, etc. This is IMHO really needed as an orientation for people who want to use Linux as a PVR.
And I hadn't heard of TVHeadEnd, so thank you :-). I don't think I'll abandon development of boxstar though, because there's no mention of support for Freesat's EPG or LCNs on FS or Freeview, and that's important to me.
My current development direction is based on python and gstreamer. I had long intended to use gstreamer for playback anyway, which makes deciding to use its RTSP plugins for streaming a no-brainer and I was starting to find doing all the rest from scratch in C too laborious. Now gstreamer has some usable DVB source elements although they'll need rewriting to support Freesat. Freeview LCNs are already supported, bonus :-).
Am Freitag, den 06.05.2011, 14:04 +0100 schrieb Tony Houghton:
And I hadn't heard of TVHeadEnd, so thank you :-). I don't think I'll abandon development of boxstar though, because there's no mention of support for Freesat's EPG or LCNs on FS or Freeview, and that's important to me.
My current development direction is based on python and gstreamer. I had long intended to use gstreamer for playback anyway, which makes deciding to use its RTSP plugins for streaming a no-brainer and I was starting to find doing all the rest from scratch in C too laborious. Now gstreamer has some usable DVB source elements although they'll need rewriting to support Freesat. Freeview LCNs are already supported, bonus :-).
Tony, I'd like to encourage you to discuss boxstar on the new forum I have created in a way that clarifies what the current limitations of VDR are for you or others. If boxstar solves problems that VDR users have in the UK, we can't afford to ignore boxstar. But I don't see the new forum as a place where boxstar users may ask for support for their boxstar installation.
Of course, limitations or advantages of MythTV for UK users would also be a possible topic within the new forum, but they should always be put into a relation with VDR. The goal is to look for ways to improve VDR.
Just my 2 cents... ;-)
Cheers, Henning
On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 8:38 AM, Henning Pingel henning@henningpingel.de wrote:
Maybe this could also be a good starting point for building up an English language VDR user community forum - starting off with UK/Ireland users. I always thought an English language community was missing next to the German language VDR portal (www.vdr-portal.de).
There is already a large english-speaking forum located at DVBN. http://dvbn.happysat.org
There are a lot of VDR and mythtv users there, some of which actually use yavdr but most who compile VDR themselves.
@Rob Davis: Don't worry, you're not alone. There is a huge NA VDR community, although most of it exists outside of this mailing list and most VDR forums. The best place to associate with your kind is likely the Linux forum at DVBN. :)
Am Donnerstag, den 05.05.2011, 11:16 +0200 schrieb VDR User user.vdr@gmail.com:
There is already a large english-speaking forum located at DVBN. http://dvbn.happysat.org
There are a lot of VDR and mythtv users there, some of which actually use yavdr but most who compile VDR themselves.
Interesting. But I guess that this is a specific satellite users board so people with digital cable TV or terrestrial Digital TV wouldn't turn up in that forum to ask their questions, right? I'm just guessing.
It would be interesting to draw something like a world map with highlighted regions where VDR is popular. And I guess that every region has their own patches to solve their regional needs (ATSC, ATSC EPG, NA EIT, BBC red button).
Cheers, Henning
On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Henning Pingel henning@henningpingel.de wrote:
There is already a large english-speaking forum located at DVBN. http://dvbn.happysat.org
There are a lot of VDR and mythtv users there, some of which actually use yavdr but most who compile VDR themselves.
Interesting. But I guess that this is a specific satellite users board so people with digital cable TV or terrestrial Digital TV wouldn't turn up in that forum to ask their questions, right? I'm just guessing.
There aren't a lot of dvb-c/dvb-t (atsc) VDR users that I'm aware of but they do exist. The small handful of people I know who do fall into that category have mostly headaches - not because of VDR but rather shotty/buggy drivers for their cards, etc. Satellite sources are by far the most popular here in NA.
It would be interesting to draw something like a world map with highlighted regions where VDR is popular. And I guess that every region has their own patches to solve their regional needs (ATSC, ATSC EPG, NA EIT, BBC red button).
NA is pretty well-supported at this point. As of VDR-1.7.18, the only regional type patch people need relates to dvb-s EIT. Due to its proprietary nature, it simply can't be merged into VDR's core. AFAIK, that's the only real issue -- if there are problems with cable or terr., I'm not really aware of them.
I realized a long time ago that it's pretty hard to accurately determine how many users VDR has, at least here. I do know we have a large community but the majority don't participate in this mailing list, the foreign-language forums (such as vdrportal), or even the english forums. I've been trying for ages to get people to be more involved, and some have, but for the most part, they still don't. Another problem is that there are very very few actual NA developers. Unfortunately we've lost a lot of users to the dark side (AKA mythtv), which has a bit more NA support/developer activity.
Am Donnerstag, den 05.05.2011, 17:38 +0200 schrieb Henning Pingel:
I was wondering if it would make sense to offer a place for VDR users using the sky_uk/freesat/S28.2E/freeview platforms to communicate with each other. The intention is that people can discuss their special needs like freesat EPG, red button stuff, channel lists, channel logos and all other things and test new inventions (like the red button extension) together.
Hi,
I have just created a forum area for UK/Ireland VDR users (or users of S28.2E) at forum.yavdr.com. [1]
This is just one small sub-forum that may not seem to fit into its parent category ATM and maybe it doesn't even look inviting. An empty forum always feels awkward. Please ignore that for now and just start using it as is. Let's see how it develops. It might as well not be used at all after a few weeks time, but who knows? If it is being used, we can discuss structural improvements later.
I would be happy if it is of help for the UK/Ireland VDR community.
I might step in as a moderator a) if inappropriate topics are being discussed (see welcome posting in forum). b) if the language used in the sub-forum is not English (there are enough other places to get help in German language). c) if topics are not covering any of these categories: TV, PVR, Linux, VDR.
Regards, Henning
-
Henning Pingel -
Morfsta -
Rob Davis -
Tony Houghton -
VDR User