[MPlayer-dev-eng] tv tunner card issues

[Gábor Lénárt]

Hi!

Some words about TV tunner card support inside mplayer.
Please read it thorugh before you answer since my letter can be confusing
if you read only a part of it. ANd yeah, I have a bad headache now :( so sorry
for language/techinal/etc problems :)

It's very annoying to set up parameter of switch '-tv' each times.
I'm planning to rename this option to '-tvopts' so you can easily put it into
your config file 'tvopts=...'. Now the trick: there will be a NEW '-tv'
switch which won't have any parameter (or at least the video device but this
will optional, the default will be the device name taken from '-tvopts').
mplayer should simply ignore (or at least only store parameters into a struct)
if you don't use '-tv'. So the config file holds your settings, and you only
have to specify '-tv' to watch TV. Without '-tv', '-tvopts' will be ignored.
This scheme avoids annoying you to type almost a whole line each time you
wanna watch TV with mplayer :)

Second: .awtv config file parser to be able to:

* display channel names via OSD
* cycle channels with some keys (or via menu in future mplayer GUI :)
* refer channels by names in command line, like '-tvch MTV' or similar

Suggested switch by me for this purpose is '-tvrc' with an optional parameter:
path of .xawtv file. If you don't specify, mplayer will try it from your home.

Switch '-tvrc' should be ignored by MPlayer if switch '-tv' is not specified,
so you can insert it into your config file as well statically. Maybe this game
is a bit confusing, '-tvopts' can take this purpose too with some suboption
separated by ':', like '...:driver=v4l:tvrc=/home/lgb/.xawtv:...'

My main goal is to able to store all of our TV settings into MPlayer config
file AND/OR xawtv config file and only one switch ('-tv') is enough to
activate the whole system for watching TV :) Of course this theory should be
true somewhat for mencoder too, but I don't know the current status of mencoder
at parsing MPlayer config file (I've used mencoder only once to try it out).

A little addition: maybe MPlayer should do something with 'outfmt' and '-vc'
automatically when you select TV for being input source for playing ...

I've got TV card for a single day :) so I haven't much time to check out my
theory or learn current mplayer support too much. Please correct me, and
give additional ideas.

WARNING! xawtv config file parser is being written by me now. Or does anybody
else start to implement it?

bye, Gabor


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