Plugin installation

The installation instruction of all plugins is basically the same. For specialties see the particual plugins description. But the last instance is always the README file of the plugin.

Installation

Info

The variable $SOURCEDIR stands for the directory where all the sources archives should be decompressed. Common directories are /usr/local/src, /usr/src and the home directory of the user.

The variable $PLUGIN_NAME stands for name of the plugin that is to be installed.

After the plugin sources have been downloaded from the internet, change to the PLUGINS/src directory of VDR

cd $SOURCEDIR/vdr/PLUGINS/src

and decompress the archive.

If it is a BZIP2 archive (*.tar.bz2), use

tar -jxvf /path/to/vdr-$PLUGIN_NAME-<VERSION>.tar.bz2

If it is a GZIP archive (*.tgz, *.tar.gz), use

tar -zxvf /path/to/vdr-$PLUGIN_NAME-<VERSION>.{tgz,tar.gz}

Finally, a symbolic link to the plugin name without the version number is to be created

ln -s $PLUGIN_NAME-<VERSION> $PLUGIN_NAME

Info

These instruction assume that the author of the plugin sticks with the naming conventions for VDR plugins. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

VDR only compiles plugins in directories without version numbers and prefixes like vdr- or plugin-. (Attention: vdrcd is correct, but vdr-cd not).

Info

These instruction also assume that the main vdr directory has been patched by the new user according to the relevant recommandation provided within each README or INSTALL plugin file.

You should take into notice that usually there is a patch(es) directory provided within plugins. And you are pretty often expected to patch your main vdr directory with some of those patches.

Change to the VDR root directory and compile the plugins

cd ../..
make plugins

After everything has been compiled without errors, copy the plugins to their target directory

cp PLUGINS/lib/* /usr/lib/vdr

And last but not least you have to add the plugin to the vdr start command

vdr ....... -P$PLUGIN_NAME ....

The vdr start command can be found in runvdr, vdrstart, or any other script file depending on the distribution you are using.

For developers

Sinngemäß entsprechend ../VDR/PLUGINS.html: An extract of ../VDR/PLUGINS.html

Erstellen eines Plugin-Pakets

If you want to make your plugin available to other VDR users, you'll need to
make a package that can be easily distributed.
The 'Makefile' that has been created by the call to newplugin
provides the target 'dist', which does this for you.

Simply change into your source directory and execute 'make dist':


 cd VDR/PLUGINS/src/hello
 make dist

After this you should find a file named like

 vdr-hello-0.0.1.tgz


in your source directory, where 'hello' will be replaced with your actual
plugin's name, and '0.0.1' will be your plugin's current version number.