Idea for Summer of Code 2008: DVBManager

Currently DVB support in GNOME is not very comfortable. You have to scan with dvb-utils via terminal for channels and move the generated channels.conf to the right place. Recording DVB channels is even harder and most times you just forget to start the program handling the record. Last but not least it is very hard to view the EPG.

To make these things working in GNOME it would be nice to have a tool handling scanning for channels, managing your records and getting the EPG from DVB card. To prevent forgetting the start of the record program there should be a server/client system for this part. They could talk via IPC to each other. The daemon should provice channel data for each card.

[Daemon]

• device detection
• scan functions
• record functions
• epg functions
• zap functions?
• communicate via DBUS

[GNOME Client]

• tell Daemon to scan on card X
• get EPG for channel X from Daemon
• tell daemon to add a record on card X, channel Y at a given time for a specific length
• make it a single instance application via DBUS
• ...

The GNOME client should be able to inform the user about warnings and errors via an systray icon and/or libnotify messages.

I made some screenshots of how I think client should look like (non working, just GUI ;))

systray.png main.png config.png

In config.png there will be a tab for each DVB-card to configure the channels