Hello, My apologies if I seem a bit dense here, but there have been a few threads either on vdr or linux-dvb that have my attention--yet I am having a little difficulty putting it all together. There is a thread about fixing for 8vsb tuning that has a patch which sets some #defines for (I think) how long you think it will take to tune a channel on your system, but I'm not sure I understand what it's trying to resolve. my situation: I have a rotor connected to a diseqc switch connected to a skystar budget that uses stv0299 as its frontend, but overrides voltage and possibly other routines with flexcop_set_* (like flexcop_set_voltage) etc When I'm trying to align the dish, what is the best recommended way to proceed? I remember reading some thread about new tuning modes getting checked into the linuxtv-dvb dvb-kernel CVS (now probably v4l-kernel) but it's quite hard to align a dish now. What are the requirements for setting voltage, tone, and other fe events from plugins? Older vdr versions seemed to authorize plugins to do this, but now newer ones seem to want the sets to occur from within the vdr loop, so you have to modify the vdr core code to allow a plugin to trigger events from within the main loop (is this thread-safe) So can somebody take a moment please and describe what happens to vdr in the tuning thread? What states can it be in and what is it trying to do? I know some on this list would suggest I read through the source, which I am capable of doing, but I'm asking somebody who is fluent in this to just take about five minutes to write up a pseudocode explanation just to make sure we're all on the same page. I think if we had a brief description in one message describing bullet points for what everybody's trying to solve efficiency would improve. NOTE: it takes about 25 seconds to zoom across the sky, so whatever code gets written should understand that. Thanks in advance _J