requirements:
- streaming and switching of TV channels over LAN
- scheduled recordings
- dvb server (backend) shall be Linux based
-- backend shall not use its dvb adapters, when no client is connected
- clients can be Linux or Windows (i.e. MediaPortal) based
I found projects like MythTV and vdr, but although both should be able to meet most of these requirements, i did not find a suitable solution to integrate them into Mediaportal. So i began thinking about a more elementary solution around VLC especially VLM with telnet interface and some deamon.
Unfortunately there are some issues with VLM regarding DVB inputs:
1) as the input is just "dvb://" and all tunig parameters have to be set via options, VLM does not give any feedback about tuning failures.
2) "dvb://" as input (i.e. the dvb-adapter's frontend) can only be instantiated once, so for changing the channel the media has to be stopped and an other media has to be started. Or the first media's options have to be overridden (what is actually not possible!?!)
3) although it is easily possible to setup a media with file output (for recording) to be scheduled, i did not find any solution to change the filename according to the channels name AND a date or anything else "unique"
4) There is no priority system. as illustrated in 2) scheduled records will fail, when another dvb-media has already been instantieated
Issues 2-4 could be overcome quite straight forward by adding this functionality to the Deamon app, but it would be nice if these points were addressed in VLM development, because imho many people using dvb in VLM would like these "missing" features.
Issue 1 is somehow more complicateted. One could use libvlc directly in the deamon instead of using VLM and the telnet interface.
I think these weired thougths are enough as intruduction!
I would like to start this project and am looking for other devlopers and possible users who are intrested to get involved into this.Greetings, BexX