[vlc-devel] DVB-S scanning

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le samedi 31 juillet 2010 22:02:19 David Kaplan, vous avez écrit :
> I'm busy working on improving the DVB support (there's are quite a few
> items here - specially int he area of usability).
> 
> I'd like a few suggestions re DVB-S scanning.
> 
> The best way of scanning is using sat transponder lists (imho at least).
> Using a freq range isn't that sensible and there are very good sat lists
> that can help greatly.

> It would be great if we could somehow include these lists in VLC.

We could include the lists as shared data if they were small and static. While 
I imagine they are not that big (and easy to compress), I also expect some 
churn over the timespan of a single VLC version. Then, it might not be so 
bright to have the lists offline. Moreover, churn means noise in the source 
code history.

An online list would require someone to provide the centralized service for 
us, say some HTTP server with predefined channel confs URLs for each satellite 
reception geographical areas or whatever. But does that exist? The VideoLAN 
project may (or may not) be able to host the data, but surely not to maintain 
it.

> That way
> I can reference them from the dvb code and allow for scanning of
> satellites by sat name/position.
> Is this something we could consider at all (It'll add a few kb). if so,
> where's the best place to put them and how should I access the lists from
> the VLC code (is there a generic way of handling such text file resources?)

Platform-independent data is usually stored in share/*/ and found with 
config_GetDataDir(). But I am not sure it is workable in this case.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis