GNOME DVB Daemon and GSoC '09

So far I neglected writing about this year’s Google Summer of Code. This ends with this post. As last year, I’m working on GNOME DVB Daemon.

In the last couple of weeks I concentrated on the user experience, thus making setting up devices as easy as possible. I made a short screencast that shows the new assistant started by the Totem plugin.

If there’s only one unconfigured device it’s selected automatically. If you have multiple devices it’s checked if there’s already a device group of the same type and adds the device to the group, if possible. In addition, you don’t have to care about channels.conf at all anymore. In expert mode, though, you still can create only a channels.conf file without actually setting up the devices.

The Totem plugin was improved, too. As you can see in the next screencast:

Everything that’s available in gnome-dvb-control can be accessed from within Totem. You can browse EPG, manage recordings, schedule recordings and configure devices. The next step is to remove the existing DVB code from Totem and make the dvb-daemon plugin built-in.

Furthermore, I finally took care that live TV doesn’t interfere with recordings. If a recording is coming up and you’re watching a channel on a different transport stream, streaming is stopped so the recordings can start properly. That means you can still watch a different channel on the same transport stream (TS) or record multiple channels on the same TS simultaneously.

This are all unreleased features I’m talking about, but hopefully I can make a proper tarball release soon.

Now there are basically two items left on my GSoC todo list. Writing a ring buffer to provide a way to do time shifting, pause/rewind/fast-forward live TV and a plugin system for EPG aggregators.