MHEG plugin for VDR

<h1>
MHEG plugin for VDR
</h1>
Here are some trivial patches to the "redbutton" MHEG display program which
convert it into a plugin for "VDR", a popular DVB viewing/recording
program.
</br>
</br>
The purpose of this plugin is to view the "Redbutton" interactive data
service which is broadcast in the UK by the BBC. I believe that a similar
service exists in a few other countries, such as New Zealand.
</br>
</br>
This plugin is INCOMPLETE and EXPERIMENTAL. I am still developing the code,
so please don't download it and expect it to work straight away. I am doing
my development under Debian, with a DVB-S card and "Freesat", and using
the "xineliboutput" plugin for output. I don't guarantee that this code
will work in a different environment; in particular, it creates an OSD
display that occupies the whole screen, and I think that the hardware of a
"fully-featured" DVB-S card does not support this.
<h3>
  Screenshots
</h3>
Home screen
<br/>
<img src="home.png"/>
<br/>
Weather map
<br/>
<img src="weather.png"/>
<br/>
Sport Multiscreen
<br/>
<img src="sport.png"/>
<h3>
Building
</h3>
There are actually two plugins, named "mheg" and "redbutton".
The "mheg" plugin runs in the background and downloads the
data; the "redbutton" is responsible for displaying the
data on the OSD.
<br/>
<br/>
To build the VDR plugin in Debian Squeeze:
</br>
<ol>
  <li>
    Install the following prerequisite packages:
    <pre>
      vdr-dev
      libavformat-dev
      libfontconfig1-dev
      libpng12-dev
      libswscale-dev
      libxext-dev
      libxft-dev
      libxt-dev
      xsltproc
    </pre>
  </li>
  <li>
    Download the files for the "mheg" plugin from
    <a href="mheg">here</a> into an empty directory.
    Run the shell script "makeit.sh", which will check out the redbutton
    source, patch it and build the plugin.
  </li>
  <li>
    Download the files for the "redbutton" plugin from
    <a href="redbutton">here</a> into another empty directory.
    Run the shell script "makeit.sh", which will check out the redbutton
    source, patch it and build the plugin.
  </li>
</ol>
To build the plugins by hand:
<ol>
  <li>
     Build vdr version 1.6.0 from source.
  </li>
  <li>
    In the vdr source directory, checkout the source code of 
    redbutton-download and redbutton-browser programs with the following 
    commands:
    <pre>
    svn co https://redbutton.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/redbutton/redbutton-download/trunk --revision 538 PLUGINS/src/mheg
    svn co https://redbutton.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/redbutton/redbutton-browser/trunk --revision 541 PLUGINS/src/redbutton
    </pre>
    Note that this puts the redbutton-download source in PLUGINS/src/mheg
    and the redbutton-browser source in PLUGINS/src/browser
  </li>
  <li>
    Download the files for the "mheg" plugin from <a href="mheg">here</a>
    into PLUGINS/src/mheg, and apply the patch redbutton-download-538.patch.
    Run "make" in this directory.
    <br/>
    This should build a plugin file PLUGINS/lib/libvdr-mheg.so.1.6.0
  </li>
  <li>
    Download the files for the "redbutton" plugin from <a href="redbutton">here</a>
    into PLUGINS/src/redbutton, and apply the patch redbutton-browser-541.patch.
    Run "make" in this directory.
    <br/>
    This should build a plugin file PLUGINS/lib/libvdr-redbutton.so.1.6.0
  </li>
</ol>
<h3>
Running
</h3>
<p>
The code requires access to an X11 display in order to work. It does not
write anything to the display - all output is via the OSD - but the
code makes extensive use of X11 functions which need a display handle.
If you are running vdr as a daemon, you will need to give it permission to
access the display: I did this simply by running the command
"xhost +local:". If you are running vdr on a headless box, you will have
to install xvfb.
</p>
<p>
Tune to BBC1 and select the redbutton plugin from the main VDR menu.
You should see a icon in the corner of the screen, telling you
to press the red button.
</p>
I put the following line in keymacros.conf:
<pre>
Red @redbutton Red
</pre>
so that pressing the red button both selects the plugin and sends the
initial red button keypress.
<br/>
To exit from the plugin, press the "stop" button.
<h3>
Bugs and features
</h3>
<ul>
  <li>
    Sometimes the MHEG application wants to show the current video stream
    in a small window. This doesn't work properly: instead of seeing the
    whole picture compressed to fit into the window, you just see a
    cutout portion of the whole picture.
  </li>
  <li>
    The "Sports Multiscreen" option on the main menu works OK, and
    I can switch between the various sports feeds; also pressing "red"
    to go home works. But pressing yellow to go back causes a crash.
  </li>
  <li>
    It's fairly easy to make the whole thing crash. I'm squashing bugs
    as I find them.
  </li>
</ul>
<h3>
Author
</h3>
All the redbutton download and browser code was written by Simon Kilvington
for his standalone MHEG browser, which is available from
<a href="http://redbutton.sourceforge.net">http://redbutton.sourceforge.net</a>.
All thanks, bouquets, bottles of wine and cheques for large amounts of money
should be sent directly to him.
<br/>
All I have done is to convert the stand-alone programs into VDR plugins.
However, this makes me solely responsible for all the bugs in these
plugins, so please send all your brickbats, complaints and patches to
fix bugs to me: john (at) pond-weed.com