Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 11:20:18 -0500 From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com> To: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: "Windows 98" program guides Message-ID: <19980315112018.47411@ct.picker.com> In-Reply-To: <19980313070708.24612@ct.picker.com>; from Randall Hopper on Fri, Mar 13, 1998 at 07:07:08AM -0500 References: <19980312224107.20558@follo.net> <19980313070708.24612@ct.picker.com>
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Eivind Eklund:
|> | Windows 98 is an upgrade of Windows 95 that is slated to
|> | include an integrated Web browser, a television tuner and
|> | program guide, faster application loading, and built-in support
|> | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
...
|
|What I tried to do was just to get Fxtv to read a program guide, which
|containted the following:
|
|* Program channel, name and times (e.g, TV 2 has Cheers from time N to
| time N, specified as seconds from 1970)
|* Program type - SPORT, SERIAL, etc.
|* User state information, like "I'm not interested in knowing that XXX
| exists" as a flag for each program, set seperately from Fxtv.
So MSW98 includes, I'm assuming, an API to TV tuners, and not a packaged tuner
itself. Similarly for program guides, which I gather are metadata sent in
the frames indicating what's going to be on shortly (or just "now", I'm
not sure).
Questions:
1) Are these "program guides" broadcast on all channels?
2) Does this program guide data indicate what's on all channels you can
receive, regardless of which you're viewing?
3) Do these guides speak in terms of channel names or frequencies?
4) Is the same program guide data broadcast on all channels?
5) Where on PAL TVs is the program guide info available?
6) What can a PAL TV do with program guide info (mask all SPORT, etc.)
7) Is the content of the teletext well-defined and the same for all
PAL everywhere (i.e. is there a generic algorithm to extract program
guides and a specific set of fields in a program guide).
8) What flies by in teletext besides program guides?
9) Is teletext "text" data all in the "ISO-8859-1" codeset? If not,
how does one tell what codeset is being used?
What I'm getting to is how we could support this best. Some of it
obviously needs to be abstracted from applications, either in drivers, in
a tuner library package that all clients link with, or both.
At the app level, it sounds like this might be useful for displaying
something like what we in the US know as "The Preview Channel" on cable.
Maybe a little text window that appears below your main TV window showing
you what's flying by in the program guide.
Of course, this should be meshed in with Intercast if possible so we can
have one consistent method for grabbing VBI data and attributing it
correctly to make the job of the many tuner clients simpler. It would be
kinda cool to have apps like Fxtv grabbing URLs out of the VBI and issuing
commands to the web browser (e.g. "netscape -remote "openURL($url)") to go
surf the link as it flies by :-)
|My intention was to make it possible to avoid ever getting sports and
|bad serials into my fxtv :-) However, I was stopped at the early point
Here, I'm confused. Would you want to just see a blank screen when you
surf to a channel teletext says has a SPORT show on? Would you want to
have +/- channel just skip past that channel? What should happen when you
tell Fxtv to go straight to a channel (by name, frequency, or number) which
teletext said had SPORT on?
|I think we should be able to do the same functionality - make Fxtv
|understand actual programs/shows, not just knowing about channels.
|That's about as far as I wanted to go.
I think with the answers to some of my questions above, I might be able to
help you more with putting this in. As you can tell, I'm trying to get a
handle on "what is teletext", "what do PAL TVs do with teletext", and "what
would a tuner app like Fxtv do with teletext".
After that, we can look at the appropriate driver mods (chip issues you and
Luigi hinted at, etc.) and a TunerLib API (apps shouldn't each have to
implement separately how to parse these bytestreams), and then what that
means in terms of tuner app clients.
Thanks,
Randall
Luigi Rizzo:
| 00 .103 TELEVIDEO Ve 13 Mar 17:41:04
| 01 .||||,,l<,l<ll|,<,l||,,l<,l<,l,<|,<,l|||
| 02 . j?o4?o4.jt~5?o4 j?o4?o47q*5}z5?o4
| 03 . j7#h5}4.j*j57k5 j7#h7k5}~%55k57k5
| 04 .////,//,-,-../,-/,//,//,/,-,.--/,-/,///
| 05 AVVIATA PROCEDURA REVOCA GIORGIANNI.
| 06 .Consiglio ministri all'unanimit{....104
| 07 .Giorgianni:} "cultura del sospetto".105
| 08 .Antimafia apre nuova fase inchiesta.106
| 09 .,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,$
| 10 .DECRETO DI BELLA: DUBBI CONS. STATO.108
| 11 .Comitato bioetica difende la Bindi..109
| 12 .Regioni:sconcerto per decisione TAR.110
| 13 .,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,$
| 14 .KOSOVO:RUGOVA NON INCONTRA SERBI... 111
| 15 .,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,$
| 16 .Sassi:periti,si rischi| la strage...112
| 17 .Roma,truffa miliardaria su bollette.113
| 18 .,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,$
| 19 .CINEMA, ABOLITA CENSURA ASSOLUTA
| 20 .Sondaggio: Cinema, che passione.....140
| 21 ... KOSOVO, L'AUTONOMIA NEGATA 160
| 22 ...NASCITA: LA MAGIA DI UN EVENTO 170
| 23 ...Altre notizie 120 Terza Pagina 140
| 24 .103 TELEVIDEO Ve 13 Mar 17:41:04
|
|(the top rows are graphics, and someone contributed a program to
|convert the output into gif images. If you are willing to make
|a port of this stuff...
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