Marko Mäkelä’s software projects: Customising VDR

I have set up a DVB-T recorder and player based on Debian GNU/Linux, VDR and the plugins vdr-softdevice and vdr-subtitles. The most important modifications I have made will be available here until they have been included in the official releases.

Patches related to Udo Richter’s shutdown rewrite

VDR 1.5.1 includes rewritten shutdown logic by Udo Richter. He has also prepared a patch against VDR 1.4. I have adapted VDR some plugins to take advantage of his patch, to suspend the output when the system is running unattended.

Please note that the global variable Shutdown was renamed to ShutdownHandler when Udo Richter’s patch version 0.4 was applied to VDR 1.5.1. The following patches require VDR 1.5.1 or Udo Richter’s patch version 1.0 or later

Subtitles
Patch for 0.5.0
Softdevice
Patch
Relay
Version 0.1.0 and later depend on the rewritten shutdown logic.

This is the preferred way of suspending the output, and it is incompatible with my Suspend patch, which is available for historical reasons.

Introducing a Suspend function

This section is available for historical reasons. The preferred solution is Udo Richter’s shutdown rewrite.

The vdr-softdevice plugin can be configured to suspend and resume video and audio playback at run time. This is useful if the system is running unattended, because it saves processing power (possibly reducing the need for cooling) and avoids crashes due to bugs in the decoder, possibly triggered by bad input signal. Because of technical limitations of the plugin interface, I wrote a patch to introduce a suspend flag in VDR itself.

After you have applied the patch, recompile vdr and plugins.

The patch introduces three Setup/Miscellanous menu items. The Booleans Power button suspends playback and Playback suspended should be self-explanatory. The integer, Suspend to shutdown timeout (s), is 0 by default, meaning that no shutdown will be initiated when playback is suspended by pressing the Power button. If you would like to use the Power button as a smart power-off button that works in any context, set this timeout to a suitable value, e.g., five seconds. Should you only want to suspend playback and not power the system off, you can press Power followed by OK. The latter button-press will confirm the Press any key to cancel shutdown prompt if one is presented. (If any timed recordings are in progress, the prompt will be presented after they have finished, unless the shutdown was cancelled by pressing any button.)

Be sure to use vdr 1.3.32 or later, because otherwise a long press of the button will confirm any Press any key to cancel shutdown prompt. If you are using the DirectFB output of the vdr-softdevice plugin, be sure to use recent versions of both (DirectFB 0.9.23 or later and vdr-softdevice 0.1.3 or later), or key-repeat events will be misreported as key-press events.

You may also want to map the ACPI power-button event to the command svdrpsend.pl HITK Power.

Download

vdr-1.4.0-suspend-0.4.3.patch.gz, vdr-1.3.47-suspend-0.4.3.patch.gz, vdr-1.3.46-suspend-0.4.3.patch.gz, vdr-1.3.38-suspend-0.4.3.patch.gz, vdr-1.3.35-suspend-0.4.3.patch.gz, vdr-1.3.34-suspend-0.4.3.patch.gz
Version 0.4.3. Added French translations (thanks to Nicolas Huillard). Added #define VDR_SUSPEND to config.h, so that plugins can check the presence of cStatus::SetSuspend(bool) with #ifdef.
vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.4.2.patch.gz
Version 0.4.2. Added Swedish translations (thanks to Per Mellander).
vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.4.1.patch.gz
Version 0.4.1. This is identical with version 0.4, except that the #ifdef SUSPEND_PATCH tests have been removed in order to remove binary incompatibility with plugins depending on cStatus or cSetup.
vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.4.patch.gz
Version 0.4. This version implements a method cStatus::SetSuspend(bool) that can be monitored by plugins. Thus, relay control can be efficiently implemented in a plugin.
vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.3.patch.gz
Version 0.3. This version maps the Power button to the suspend function, and it makes the suspend flag accessible in VDR setup. The --suspend and --relay options have been removed.
vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.2.patch.gz, vdr-1.3.31-suspend-0.2.patch.gz
Version 0.2. The suspend flag can be toggled by pressing a Suspend button introduced by this patch. The command line option --suspend can be used to specify the initial value of the flag (default 0, i.e., not suspended). Optionally, there will be a --relay option for specifying a serial interface connected to a solid-state relay (default none, i.e., no relay control).

To do

vdr-relay plugin

By connecting a solid-state relay to the VDR system, it is possible to power on the monitor and speakers only when playback is not suspended.

As there are too many ways to connect a relay to the computer, it is not appropriate to implement relay interfaces in VDR itself. The vdr-relay plugin connects the suspend flag to the serial interface driving a solid-state relay.

Download

vdr-relay-0.1.1.tgz
Version 0.1.1. Requires VDR 1.5.1 or later, or Udo Richter’s shutdown rewrite version 1.0 or later.
vdr-relay-0.1.0.tgz
Version 0.1.0. Requires Udo Richter’s shutdown rewrite version 0.3 or 0.4.
vdr-relay-0.0.1b.tgz
Initial version, but Makefile adapted for vdr 1.4.0.
vdr-relay-0.0.1.tgz
Initial version. Requires the vdr-suspend patch version 0.4.1 or later.
runvdr
My runvdr script for the plugin. Initially, playback is suspended unless the system was powered on by remote control.
linux-cx88-suspend.patch
A kernel patch for reading the status of the infrared receiver during cx88 driver initialization. The runvdr script above depends on this patch.
vdr-shutdown
My vdr-shutdown script for programming the nvram-wakeup timer for scheduled recordings.

cx88: do not misreport key-repeat events as key-press: linux-2.6.13-cx88-repeat.patch, linux-2.6.14-cx88-repeat.patch

When testing the range of the remote control unit bundled with my Hauppauge Nova-T PCI 90002, I noticed that the input event interface will report multiple key-press events when a key is being pressed and the connection to the infrared receiver module is interrupted for longer than 120 milliseconds. This may be the right solution for keys for which key-repeat is natural, such as volume level adjustment controls, but most keys in VDR should not repeat.

This patch will ignore repeat codes that arrive after the key-release event has been delivered. The drawback is that when the infrared connection is interrupted while a repeat key is being pressed, no event will be delivered for the key until it is released and pressed again, to flip the RC5 toggle bit.

The ultimate solution would be to rewrite ir-common.c so that it would translate infrared code frames to key-press or key-repeat events like av7110_ir.c does, instead of relying on the repeat timer magic in input.c. Currently, if a key is pressed in rapid succession, the driver will incorrectly deliver key-repeat events instead of key-press events, asynchronously to the actual real-world key-press events. Key-release events would still be delivered after a timeout.

cx88: map RC5 frames to key-press or key-repeat events: linux-2.6.15.2-cx88_input.patch, linux-2.6.15.2-cx88_input2.patch

These are experimental patches to cx88-input.c and ir-common.c that map RC5 infrared code frames to key-press or key-repeat events. These patches, based on ideas taken from av7110_ir.c, are likely to break things for other users of ir-common.c. The remote control decoder logic should be refactored, and more of the logic should be moved to ir-common.c. For instance, av7110_ir.c duplicates much of the code in ir-common.c.

With the first patch, there is no delay between the key-press and the first key-repeat event. The second patch discards the first repeated frame, so that key-repeat events are less likely to be generated accidentally.