Luca Olivetti wrote:
> VDR doesn't let you switch to a channel that you cannot decrypt. I
> usually like this feature, so I won't switch to a channel I cannot see,
> but today some channels at 28.5E are FTA (a sky promotion or a technical
> glitch?), even if they have a caid!=0, so I had to modify
> cDvbDevice::ProvidesCa to alway return true. I know that sky's to blame
> (or maybe they just don't want to advertise their channels as FTA), but
> maybe it should be a configurable option.
I strongly agree that the current mechanism is theoretically a good
idea but works poorly in practise.
1) Many channels have a caid=0, but when you tune to them,
all you see is a black screen.
Maybe they transmit only rarely or they are in fact
encrypted, but do not set the proper caid.
2) When you have a certain cam, it does not mean that you can
always receive *all* channels supported by its ID.
So you will have even more "dead" channels in your channels.conf.
3) Channels may broadcast unencrypted in spite of caid!=0 (see above).
4) If you do not have any cam, you tend to get a huge channels.conf
with mostly unusable garbage in it.
What I would *love* to see is the following feature:
Every time VDR does an EPG scan, it reads from the channel it just
switched to. If there are no data within a few seconds, it increments
a number in the channel entry, if there are data, it clears this
number. If the number exceeds a configurable threshold, the
channel entry is deleted.
Before adding new channels to channels.conf, VDR switches to the
channel and reads from it. If there are no data within a few seconds,
it does not add it.
With this feature, only interesting new channels (like the ones you
observed above) would appear at the end of channels.conf, inactive
channels would disappear automatically after a while and the whole
channels.conf would stay a lot cleaner and more manageable.
Carsten.
