GSoC 2008 is about to end

Another Summer of Code for GNOME will end soon. As you probably know my task was to write a DVB Manager. Last week I was able to add an option to do a brute force scan for DVB-T (shamelessly stolen from Zaheer’s code). In addition, I was finally able to work on the EPG part. When you record a show the name and description of the currently running show at the beginning of the recording is associated with the recording. Each channel has a Schedule associated with it that contains a sorted list of events (shows) from EPG. Although, it basically works and is accessible through D-Bus I’m not happy how EPG data is currently collected. Currently, I’m iterating over all channels, tune to each of them and store the EPG data I receive. Especially, for satellite this takes a lot of time. Furthermore, during the scan the DVB card can’t be used to watch TV or record shows. E.g. when you watch TV with Totem for some time, dvb-daemon won’t be able to collect EPG data. I honestly have no idea how one can avoid this problem. On the UI part I improved the UI to manage timers. It will now show a red dot when an recording is currently active and the UI will update when timers are added or removed.

Nevertheless, dvb-daemon isn’t that bad. What currently works well is:

• Recording with manually provided start time and duration
• Automatically distribute overlapping recordings between adapters of same group
• Scan for channels
• Browse already recorded shows
• UI to scan for channels
• UI to configure devices
• UI to create and delete timers

Despite that GSoC ends I’m going to continue working on dvb-daemon. There are couple of items on my to do list:

• store EPG that it doesn’t get lost when the daemon is stopped
• schedule recording from EPG
• record multiple shows on same transport stream at the same time with a single adapter
• Better integrate into UPnP world
• Recognize when recorded show is deleted manually and not by the daemon
• Write radio plugin for Rythmbox
• Better integrate with Totem
• Search EPG

Last but not least, I have to do a tarball release. I’m currently waiting for a bug in mpegtsparse to be fixed. Once it’s fixed I’m going to do a proper release. For the brave and impatient: bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~sebp/bzr/dvb-daemon