Monday, May 31, 2004

- General
Made a modification to the DG Marker so that users can enable the prompting for recording quality (modifying parameter 1).
Build 250b03

Thursday, May 27, 2004

- General
Did some work on supporting a slightly different command line syntax for users with 3 devices but only wanting 2 to run ...
in this case - WinTVCap and InfraRed together or Nebula DigiTV.
Makes is slightly awkward but works.
At least - it works for me. Not working for the person that wants it but I think it will once syntax is sorted out on his installation. Build 250b01

- Forum
Basis for a support forum now established.
Open for use to see how it goes here.

Sunday, May 16, 2004

- General
Modified PostProcessRecord so that the comand and parameters can be kept apart. Otherwise - the quoting of the command can make make quoted parameters go wrong.
Build 249b13
- ProgDVB
By default - DABDig takes the given channel name and tries to launch ProgDVB with it. This mode can be overridden by setting ProgDVBTakeNum=1. However, the interface wiht myHTPC seems to never provide a channel name ... so the default way of operating did not work very well. To make life easier - I have changed the software (build 249b11) to act as if ProgDVBTakeNum=1 if the given channel name is empty. Should make defalt installations easier.

Monday, May 10, 2004

- General
Added a few more substitutions for PostProcessRecord and extended the facility to whereever SendKeys is called (optional in case someone was already using $ in one of their existing sequences). Build 249b09

- TwinHan VisionDTV
Had feedback that (as half expected) the 2.41 build of their system that throws up a dialogue box at the end of the scheduled recording .. does not like being aborted while the box is open.
Might be able to code around it ... but since it is difficult to get feedback about which window has really been selected then this is not really the basis of a good solution.
Since their 2.42 removes the dialogue box then makes sense to ask people to upgrade their software but apparently has introduced a problem with aspect ratio handling.
I have suggested some feedback for TwinHan that gives control over the recorded file name via the scheduled recording entry - which would be even better.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

- General
Added initial support for command line substitution in PostProcessRecord command line.
VisionDTV user is starting ot use it to re-encode the recordings.
Just added 4 substitutions for now - 1 is PartialFileName for backwards compatibility (although I do not think that many are using it ... no-one has told me anyway) another is simply a way to put the escape character back in ($). The other 2 are the ChannelName and ChannelAssignment.
Later will probably add things like date/time of start of recording, title, series/episode and description so that people can write their own library files or populate the ID3 (or similar) tags in the re-encoded files.

Saturday, May 08, 2004

- TwinHan VisionDTV
Been exchanging email and builds with a user of VisionDTV. This has lead to a few changes and me deciding to document the dabdig.map facility that has been in the software since 2.45 (about 1 year ago). I have explained it to a few people over the last year when it helped them simplify a lumti-device set-up but I thought that I might change it in the future. However, two aspects of the TwinHan VisionDTV implementation have lead me to making this official now. The first is because the VisionDTV software does not store anything that resembles a recognisable broadcast channel number. It is all based on internal sort order. So, matching a request to a channel is hard. This leads to the second reason ... I chose to default to trying to match the channel name. However, the channel name provided by the EPG is not always the same as the name that is broadcast over the air that is used by VisionDTV. For example ... "BBC 1" and "BBC One".
This means that for many (UK at least) users - things would not work first time wihtout making configuration changes somewhere.
So - a solution would be to release a dabdig.map with DABDig that is pre-populated with known channel names. Even if it is not complete, it should be easy enough for an end-user to work out what is missing and add in the extra parts.
This could mean that dabdig.map is always used in future releases and also that existing users of dabdig.map would get their map over-written when they installed a new build. I do not want that to happen. So what I think I will do is stick the sample dabdig.map into a new directory and then suggest that VisionDTV users copy it over or even copy it over myself when DABDig runs and there is no .map already present.

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

- Leadtek WinFast
Change in 249b01 worked

- ProgDVB
One user trying to use ProgDVB with TwinHan VisionPlus.
Usually it works - but looks like an issue within ProgDVB/TwinHan-drivers which results in occasional crashes.
Took opportunity to change the way that I handle ProgDVB so that it now asks it to exit at the end of a recording and if it is already running at the start of a new recording then it waits until ProgDVB exits. Means that back-to-back (or overlapped) shows are handled better ... but means that the programme should not be left running idle. This new facility can be turned off (249b02 and 249b03).

Monday, May 03, 2004

- Leadtek WinFast
Selecting CVBS not working. Never had someone to try it before. Looks like it needs to have an extra field set in the schedule file. (I guessed that it would have a value of 0 but trying now with 2) - made 249b01

- TwinHan VisionDTV
Another user is giving it a try. I think it is the lowest cost DVB-T card at the moment so will probably be a few more users on the way.
ProgDVB can also support it - so more than one way to drive it.

Saturday, May 01, 2004

- General
Made a public release of current state of play - 2.48b18
(removed KWorld though as it is not ready for even limited testing until I getting the floating number date working. Not had any time to work on it).