Sky-plugin

Description

The sky plugin is included with VDR and implements a new device, which is based on the MPEG2 encoder card described at linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml. It allows you to connect the analog a/v output of your Sky Digibox to VDR, so that you can enjoy the full recording flexibility of VDR with your Sky subscription.

Note that this is NOT something that does anything illegal, like decrypting the Sky programme without a subscription. You will need a Sky Digibox and a valid subscription in order to use this plugin.

Installation

The 'kfir' module must be loaded with the option 'streamtype=4' to make it produce a Transport Stream.

modprobe kfir streamtype=4

The Digibox is remotely controlled through VDR via LIRC (see lirc.org). The file lircd.conf.sky contains the remote control codes necessary to control the Digibox.

In order to access the Sky channels VDR needs to know the channel number under which each channel is stored in the Sky Digibox. These numbers are stored in the file channels.conf.sky, together with the channel IDs as derived from the actual channel data and the names under which the EPG data for each channel can be found (see below). Copy this file to your plugins config directory, in a subdirectory named sky, as in

mkdir /etc/vdr/sky
cd $SOURCEDIR/VDR/PLUGINS/src/sky
cp channels.conf.sky /etc/vdr/plugins/sky/

The Sky EPG is available on the Internet at http://www.bleb.org. The Perl script getskyepg.pl extracts the EPG data from these pages and sends it to VDR via an SVDRP connection. The channel names as used on the bleb.org pages are defined in the channels.conf.sky file. You can keep your EPG data up-to-date by entering a call to getskyepg.pl into your /etc/crontab. Call getskyepg.pl -h for a list of options.

Links

[1]	http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr	Plugin homepage
[2]	http://www.lirc.org	LIRC homepage
[3]	http://www.bleb.org	Sky EPG data