Sunday, July 31, 2005

- Topfield
I should have added this entry about a week ago - quick summary now.
A few new beta builds have been made. Some of the changes for the Topfield support have been done in a fairly general way so that, for exmaple

  • - there is a new substitutable parameter for the duration in hours and minutes (i.e. a 90 minutes programme can be shown as something like 01:30)

  • - some number to name mapping can be applied e.g. to match "BBC 1" with "BBC ONE". This will not work for all devices though.



- General
If more than one DABDig is running at once there can be a reported problem with not getting write access to the log file. This is handled in the code by reporting the issue to the screen and continuing without logging for that run.
I have now enabled the retry code so that it will try a few times to write to the file because there are a few more configurations where people are increasing the alert look-ahead time to being longer than 1 day. Plus a new function to request an immediate action (rather than waiting for the marker to fire) is exposed in DigiGuide 8.2 (Beta) which I have used to help people who want to record on devices that are not always connected to the PC where DABDig is installed.



A problem has been found in command line handling when there is more than one word enclosed in quotes - e.g. "this is a "Programme Description" with quotes in it"
It is more of a feature of how commmand line parsing works in Windows (DOS).
This results in a mess!
This next one will work - although the internal quotes will be stripped - "this is a programme description with "one" quoted word"

There are numerous possible solutions - but I went for one that allows the parameters on the command line to be encoded in the same way as a URL. I then modified the command line parser to decode the data before before "echoing" the command line to the log file. This is to make things look the same to anyone who parses the log file (bad idea) and also to keep the log file easily readable. This additional parsing will only happen if the parameter is prefixed by a special marker - which is currently set to "DABDigURI:" but I might change that before release. Therefore - this new code will not be activated unless that calling program does something special. For DigiGuide it needs a new DABDig.dgmarker - a very simple change. I am holding off making this the default way of working though because DigiGuide 8.2 (beta) will include a new function that allows the marker to modify the command line just before sending it to DABDig ... so I could then replace double-quote with single-quote.

(255b12)

Sunday, July 17, 2005

- Topfield PVR
Added initial support for Topfield PVR via Jag's EPG.
(255b06 and 255b07)
Need to do some automatic channel look-up - but have not got definitive sample channel file yet.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

- Fly2000TV
Added support for Fly2000TV - for both TV and radio with record and play.
(255b05)