VDR stuff

This page contains some random VDR things that someone might find useful, but for most people it's just random garbage. Have fun and let me know of problems and feature requests.

Weather monitor

I did a little weather monitor plugin that shows the current weather in an OSD window. It only works in Åbo, Finland, as it fetches weather from a local weather station. There is some other weather plugin somewhere that is more "portable". Use that instead. :)

Download the plugin: vdr-weather-0.1.tar.gz.

Recording monitor

This little plugin might be a bit more useful. It monitors when recording start and stop, and lights a LED connected to the parallel port when a recording is in progress. It uses the parout application for actually writing out the value to the parallel port. The actual LED "circuits" is made using the instructions on this page. The LED will be turned on as long as there is at least one recording active, and turned off as soon as no recordings are active anymore.

The plugin has no input and nothing can be configured. Check the source for details. Yes, there aren't many lines of code in there.

Download the plugin: vdr-led-0.3.tar.gz.
An older version is also available: vdr-led-0.2.tar.gz.

channels.conf for Turku, Finland

You can use this channels.conf if you use DVB-c in Turku, Finland. The file has been updated 2003-10-29 due to some changes done by Turun Kaapelitelevisio, and is compatible with VDR version 1.2.x. The procedure I followed to generate that file was this:

  1. Download and install recent drivers. Make sure they work and modprobe them. so that they are loaded
  2. Change to the apps/scan directory in the DVB driver package and make sure the scan application is compiled.
  3. Download this tunig data file that contains data about the channels in the Turku cable network. The file is assembled using info from Turun Kaapelitelevisio.
  4. Start scanning the network using the scan tool: 
    	% ./scan -o vdr fi-turku > channels.conf
  5. You may edit the generated channels.conf and sort the channels a bit, but no other editing seems to be necessary.
  6. Copy the file channels.conf to where your VDR directory is, mine is at /video/.

More information can be found here, where you'll find a lot of other good stuff.

Feedback: chakie@infa_abo_fi