ETV Personal Video Recorder

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: beta-3

Notes:

  ETV README - VERSION BETA 3
  ===========================

ETV is in beta stage now. I would not recommend it yet for 'produktion' use,
in other words keep the old VCR in your livingroom until I say otherwise ;-)

Don't expect all things to work flawlessly, this is a beta after all.
But all basic functionality should be working, although only tested
thoroughly on a single machine, not over a network.

Beta 3 mostly adds internal changes, fixes a few bugs (introducing new ones)
and adds tuning of stations with visual feedback.

And please do me a favour and read ALL the *.TXT documents...

Erik Arendse
3 March 2004


Changes:

  ETV CHANGES
  ===========

----------------- beta 3 ----------------------

* New: RecServer tool. This servers ETV files to be used over a network
  without having filesharing like samba or nfs. This is in development,
  for the moment it will only be polled if running on localhost (quite
  useless) and its caching is in its infancy.

* Changed: Reading of recordings from disk now takes place using a
  shell. For the moment this does not change anything (hopefully no fresh
  bugs) but this is the foundation for reading recordings from multiple
  directories, and (probably in the near future) over a network without
  using filesharing.

* Changed: Ffmpeg is not used statically anymore. Changed the INSTALL.TXT
  to reflect this. This makes it possible to use ETV with RPM-installed
  versions of ffmpeg. There is no version-check however, make sure to
  use at least 0.4.8.

* New: Frontend logs SDL driver used on startup. Supports --fullscreen
  and --windowed options to force into fullscreen/windowed mode on startup.

* Bugfix/New: Windows DirectX now supports accelerated video, thanks
  to another hack of SDL. Even fullscreen seems to work. Only bug for
  the moment is that if running windowed moving the window while playing
  is a sure road to disaster. So don't :-)
  DirectX accelerated video is now supported both using MSVC and MinGW
  compilers.
  Limitation: scaling-changing (alt-0/1/2) is only recognized on next start
  of player.

* Changed: Improved HWACCELL.TXT a bit. Adding some info about SDL video-
  and audio-drivers.

* New: Player supports fixed scaling modes for 2x (optimized SDL software
  scaler), 1x (no scaling), 0 (freefaktor scaling).
  Frontend option --fixedscaling selects them, or you can runtime toggle
  between them using alt-0, alt-1 and alt-2 (not sure if these keybindings
  will stay).

* New: When player can't open a file for playing a usermessage is shown.

* Changed: Shuffled around quite some code in the frontend & player.
  Mostly cleaned up event-handling and parameter passing.
  (Should not effect anything, but may have introduced bugs)

* Changed: Clarified text of timing warnings reported by player.

* Bugfix: X windows 24 bit modes now work as they should, including XV.

* New: If you press the subtitle (teletext) key (default F7) the current
  setting is shown. Only if you press repeatedly the setting toggles through
  the available options. While the setting is visible you can enter
  any pagenumber you want by pressing the numberkeys.
  All pagenumbers between 100 and FFF are supported (A-F can be entered)
  as some stations use hidden pages for special information.

* New: Used new finetuning code in the stationform to let the user
  change the frequency in steps supported by the backend (62500 Hz for BTTV)

* New: Tuning and finetuning of existing stations while watching LiveTV.
  Use Alt-Up/Down/Left/Right to finetune up/down and channeltune up/down,
  [play] stores the frequency for the active station (may be changed while
  tuning), [stop] cancels tuningmode without saving.
  The setting of the grid for the station is used implement channel up/down
  and for the size of the finetuning steps (currently only BTTV 62500 Hz
  implemented).

* Changed: polished internal handling of superuser mode, while
  in superuser mode every title now shows a '+' behind it to indicate
  you are in superusermode.

* Changed: improved loading of lists, their content is now only reloaded
  when changes can be expected.

* Bugfix: Adding of a new rule caused an error

* Changed: Moved all processing of categories/rules, and detection of
  conflicts to the backend. With the previous setup it was theoretically
  possible to get a schedule-run while the frontend was re-processing
  all categories/rules/conflics, which could mess up the active recording.
  Also a lot faster if we presume the master is running on the same machine
  as MySQL server and has a pipe-connection.