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.

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