[Kwintv] UI-Widget separation, alpha2?

[George Staikos]

On Wednesday 22 October 2003 04:18, Dirk Ziegelmeier wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 October 2003 07:58, George Staikos wrote:
> > 1) We need to prevent the endless reports of "no plugins are listed".
>
> I already added a popup with a reference to the FAQ if no devices are
> found. Since this is a consequence of "no plugins found", I don't want to
> flood the user with error messages, I think this one is enough.

  Oh that teaches me. :-)  I didn't even look in the code, but I have been 
without a TV tuner for weeks now.  I'm still waiting for my motherboard to 
return from RMA.

> > 2) The Xv driver is difficult to setup (XFree more than qtvision), and
> > the v4l driver is just not usable for most people.  I think this needs to
> > be better addressed.
>
> Someone who can download, configure and install a source package should be
> able to add one line to the XFree config file. However, I'd completely
> agree if we would ship binary packages.
> I had a look at v4l, but I have no experience with XFree/bttv concepts to
> touch it. Also, I'm not really aware of the real problems behind the
> plugin.

   I forgot to mention that many people can't even use it due to hardware 
restrictions.  Most of the lowlevel code is done and usable. The problems are 
at a higher level - the details of making a good "tv viewer", and how to 
integrate it well into a KDE app.  kvideoio does all the lowlevel wrapping 
for us and I don't think it needs to change much.  It's basically the plugin 
that needs a new approach.  using an event per frame and passing data like 
that is just too slow.  It causes a "ripping" effect that many people see.

> > 3) The crash/freeze on resize needs to be tracked down.
>
> I can reproduce it and got a bt of it. It is always the same memcpy that
> causes the crash. Unfortunately, I don't know why it happens.
> Maybe you have a clue:

  I have been hunting it for a while with no success.  We need to run it 
through valgrind probably.  Last time I tried valgrind on it, it didn't work 
well enough with qtvision but I think it has been improved since then.

> >   Without these things, I think it will result in more headaches in the
> > end to release another version of qtvision.  #2 is very time consuming to
> > fix, #3 is very tricky to fix (track down).  #1 is easy.  What do you
> > think?
>
> How can we attract someone to help with v4l plugin? Maybe via kwintv.org?
> But I think we could package an ALPHA for users that don't want to / cannot
> check out from CVS.

  I've tried. :)  A few people said they would but I have seen no code so far.  
Actually I never wanted to write it myself but I did it because no-one else 
did.  I am now in the group of people who cannot use Xv due to graphics 
hardware limitations too.

> I prefer working on easier things, I currently try to write a new channel

  Don't we all? :)

> wizard. BTW, how should it work? The current one scans frequency ranges.
> I'd like to import a region file and try all listed channels in it, this is
> much faster (XawTV does that, too). I'd like to import the xawtv lists for
> that, we would need to distribute them with qtvision for that. For XVIDEO,
> the user needs to supply a correct /dev/vbi device to get the signal
> strength. I try to also read the station name from it like motv/xawtv does
> in the next step.

   I think we should implement all methods.  Scanning frequencies is kind of 
nice (power feature), but having a predefined list is better for most users.   
Lots of what you see there now were experiments or hacks developed over the 
past 2 years.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/