From owner-freebsd-multimedia Sun Mar 15 08:22:52 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id IAA01020 for freebsd-multimedia-outgoing; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 08:22:52 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from whqvax.picker.com (whqvax.picker.com [144.54.1.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id IAA00977 for ; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 08:22:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from rhh@ct.picker.com) Received: from ct.picker.com by whqvax.picker.com with SMTP; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 11:20:32 -0500 (EST) Received: from elmer.ct.picker.com by ct.picker.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA03270; Sun, 15 Mar 98 11:20:30 EST Received: by elmer.ct.picker.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id LAA29543; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 11:20:18 -0500 Message-Id: <19980315112018.47411@ct.picker.com> Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 11:20:18 -0500 From: Randall Hopper To: Eivind Eklund , Amancio Hasty , Luigi Rizzo Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: "Windows 98" program guides Mail-Followup-To: Eivind Eklund , Amancio Hasty , Luigi Rizzo , multimedia@freebsd.org References: <19980312224107.20558@follo.net> <19980313070708.24612@ct.picker.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.89.1i In-Reply-To: <19980313070708.24612@ct.picker.com>; from Randall Hopper on Fri, Mar 13, 1998 at 07:07:08AM -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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