[MPlayer-dvb] Using mplayer as DVB watcher

[Alfredo Pironti]

First of all, thanks for the support.

>
> xml is strictly forbidden throughout the whole mplayer. A text file
> is fine

Good news. I feel very uncomfortable with XML, I was proposing it
because I thought it would have been accepted more than a plain text
file :-)

>
> uhm, it's something that probably belongs much more to a frontend
> than to mplayer itself

Indeed. It is possible that all the features I'm looking for belong
more to a frontend than mplayer itself.
Initially, I wanted to avoid writing an external frontend, trying to
reuse as much mplayer as possible (most notably OSD support), but the
drawback is a read-only channel group browsing. Moreover, another
problem arises: with TV I have the concept of "next" and "previous"
channel.
This would be lost by using mplayer alone.

We can also think about another solution. Once we decide what's best,
I'll start coding.
I could write a frontend, that by using bmovl feature of mplayer,
displays it's own OSD menu.
All channel-switching and grouping logic, and remote control input
would be handled by the frontend; mplayer being only instructed on
what channel and overlay menu to display.
I see there are similar project to this one linked on the mplayer
pages (mplayerTV, GHDTV,dvbzap-dvbtv), but none of them seems to fit
my needs. Also, my effort could be spent in patching/improving freevo
(which already uses bmovl) instead.

I think carefully designing the application can avoid wasting hours
programming something that then turns out to be useless :-)

Best regards,
Alfredo