wstewart Wrote:alcoheca, I would appreciate it if you could provide some words on the status of what's working, what not and what is to be implemented. any screens shots available?
Anyone following the svn commit logs for the unified-pvr branch will have noticed lots of work on 'Add-ons', and not much in terms of the PVR features. What is an Addon? Pretty much everything that can be added to XBMC, such as visualisations, screensavers, pvrclients, python plugins & scripts, skins, scrapers etc etc. Up to now there has not been a framework to manage these addons unilaterally and to provide unified mechanisms for settings, language files, restricting access per profile etc, irrespective of the addon type, be it C/C++ or python.
It became obvious during the development of the pvr api that rather than create yet another dialog and classes to handle pvr settings, it would be better to bring everything under the one umbrella so to speak. This ties in directly with the work on a single approach to packaging, browsing and installing Add-ons. Something akin to the addons manager in Firefox.
What works?: Visualisations, screensavers, python plugins, pvrclients & scrapers are now all handled by one set of classes CDialogAddonBrowser, CDialogAddonSettings etc. There are entry points to browse & configure particular types of addons from the Settings menu. The XBMC API has been extended to cover Dlls/SOs so now these type of addons have access to the same internal XBMC functions as python scripts.
What's still to happen?: Per profile restrictions (ie blocking pornography related addons for particular xbmc profiles); Retrieving settings directly from the addon, (ie without the default settings.xml file); some way to avoid addons from crashing XBMC (bit of a job to get that working I think...); and probably lots more that I can't think of right now.
Why are you and alwinus workng on this rather than the PVR api? We need these changes in XBMC anyway, it makes sense to spend the time improving the whole application rather than adding more specializations to XBMC.
I want to watch TV now via VDR: Use the instructions in this thread
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=45314
I want to get involved and start writing a pvrclient for '<insert pvr backend name here>' in X days, weeks, months. What do you suggest?: Wait until we have completed the addons framework and have since moved on and finalized the pvr api. By all means get more involved sooner, but please get up to speed with the code before asking questions. Follow changes to the prototype PVR client here:
http://code.google.com/p/xbmcpvr-vdr/
Is there any documentation of the API yet? There's a fair bit in the source code already and there's ongoing work on proper documentation in a more easily digestible format.
I don't want to wait, will you hurry up? Why of course, if only you'd asked sooner. We accept gold bullion, real estate & ivory archways as incentive payments
Are there any screenshots/status updates?: If there's something worthwhile of a screenshot/status update (ie, new feature added) then of course we would post that here. Asking doesn't increase the chances of it happening sooner though.
Is #xbmc-pvr the place to ask for status updates and individual support requests? no, please don't..
wstewart Wrote:A few questions and comments.
[..snip..]
Doesn't look to me like the current pvr code supports channel favorites or channel groups. This was recently added to mythtv and is in fact my patch to mythtv. It allows grouping channels into groups such as movies or for each person in the household. The channel group affects what is displayed in the EPG and affects livetv channel surfing/browsing. Any plans to add support for it?
Yes there are plans to support this. Alwinus' patch on trac has channel grouping, however only internal to XBMC. There would need to be some more thought on how to handle this when a backend supports this feature directly. Perhaps you could look at extending libcmyth to handle groups and favourites for now?
wstewart Wrote:There is quite a bit of code commented out in the VDR client, particularily on the EPG side. Given this, it is difficult to know what to do on the mythtv side. Any comments here please?
Like I said PVR work has taken a back seat for now, I'm afraid I don't know what to suggest other than what I've mentioned above. That's not to say you couldn't start to port the session management stuff from CMythSession over to your Dll/so build.