Femon-plugin

Description

Screenshot

Shows DVB signal information on the OSD.

--------------------------------------------------------------
|## Channel Name ######################### [DD][AR][VF][A][D]|
|[==== Signal Strength in % ==============|=================]|
|[==== Signal-to-Noise Ratio in % ========|=================]|
| STR: #0000 (0%)       BER: #00000000       Video: 0 Mbit/s |
| SNR: #0000 (0%)       UNC: #00000000       Audio: 0 kbit/s |
|  [LOCK]     [SIGNAL]     [CARRIER]     [VITERBI]     [SYNC] |
--------------------------------------------------------------

STR     - Signal strength
SNR     - Signal-to-noise ratio
BER     - Bit error rate
UNC     - Uncorrected blocks
Video   - Calculated video bitrate in Mbit/s
Audio   - Calculated audio / AC-3 bitrate in kbit/s

LOCK    - Everything's working...
SIGNAL  - Found something above the noise level
CARRIER - Found a DVB signal
VITERBI - FEC (forward error correction) is stable
SYNC    - Found sync bytes
 
DD      - AC-3 stream (optional)
AR      - Aspect Ratio: 1:1/4:3/16:9/2.21:1 (optional)
VF      - Video format: PAL/NTSC (optional)
A       - Audio track: 1..2 (optional)
D       - Device number: 0..3 (optional)

Handling

Key	Description
ChanUp/ChanDn	Switch channel up/down
Up/Down	Switch channel up/down
0-9	Select channel
Ok	Switch between display modes: basic, transponder, stream, AC-3
Right/Left	Switch to next/previous device that provides the current channel
Green	Select language (APID)
Back	Exit plugin

Hardware requirements

• DVB card

Installation

See plugin installation

Options

Option	Description
NTSC_SYSTEM=1	added preliminary NTSC support

Problems

• The plugin supports only those DVB cards with _one_ frontend (do any cards with multiple frontends even exist?), because I haven't yet figured howto do it without patching the VDR core.
• Sometimes (read always) ttxtsubs plugin messes up the OSD - user should disable ttxtsubs, but closing and reopening the femon plugin might help temporarily as well. Btw., this same thing happens with OSDTeletext plugin too :)
• Disable the stream analysis to speed up heavy zapping sessions.
• The signal strength and signal-to-noise ratio values are comparable only between the same brand/model frontends. Due to the lack of proper frontend specifications those values cannot be calculated into any real units.
• Shrinked OSD is available for NTSC users: make NTSC_SYSTEM=1
• The device switching feature is still non-functional.

Links

[1]

http://www.saunalahti.fi/~rahrenbe/vdr/femon

Plugin homepage