European Cardshare Forum

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I: new feature or improvement
B: bug fix
N: Note

Some of the bug fixes and improvements below have been incorporated
in DGS 2.13, but many have not yet been incorporated.

The changes are w.r.t. the previously released Neumo image (2.9a).

Boot and shutdown
-----------------
I: cold boot speed has been improved by running operations
in parallel where possible. You can now cold boot with 25 seconds
and warm boot within 15s. These numbers are typical but depend
on the spin-up speed of your hard disk.

I: removing old EPG records is no longer done at startup time. As a
result, all EPG screens now work immediately after startup (before
you had to wait before something appeared on-screen)

N: Shutdown speed has been reduced due to EPG cleaning and EPG
cleaning now takes a lot more time because of the more efficient
EPG code that gathers more data than before. Also dbepg.dat will
typically grow larger than before.

I: When pressing the power button to turn relook off, the video output
is switched off much faster so that the regular TV picture
appears. After the picture disappears relook continues to shut
down. In particular, it needs some time to delete old EPG records.
If internet EPG is in progress, shutdown will be delayed until it
is finished. Pressing the power button during database cleaning
will restart relook. Pressing the power button during internet EPG
will stop relook (this behavior will be made more consist later).

I: The filesystem of /var/media is automatically upgraded to ext3.
As a result, the filesystem check that could take 15-20 minutes
after a panic is now avoided in most cases. Older ext2-based images
will still be able to access your data, but only if relook shuts down
cleanly before you install the older image.

I: The NeumoTeam option "Check HDD on next start" now works differently:
When you turn it on, relook will do a long (15-30 minutes) filesystem
check as before, but the new thing is that it turns off the option
afterwards.

EPG
---
I: DVB EPG now gathers EPG data for all channels on the current transponder,
and not only for the current channel.

I: All start times are rounded to the nearest minute. This helps to
avoid inserting records with small overlaps or duplicate records.

I: The story window (displayed after pressing OK or info) can
now also be hidden be pressing info again.

I: In multichannel EPG the story window (EPG detail info) can now be
shown by typing the info button (the OK button also works).

I: Channel EPG has been made the default EPG because it is faster and
clearer.

I: In channel EPG, you can now type the channel number to display
the EPG of that channel. You can press OK after the last number
to display the result faster. As before you can press the
"check"-button to make the channel for which EPG is displayed the
live channel.

I: The EPG code now gathers all data from a transponder as quickly as
it can and only then starts to process it. If the user changes
channel after the data has been gathered, relook will process that
data instead of discarding it as it did before. Another advantage
is that the EPG code works faster. The old code was sometimes so
slow that it missed the next table in the sequence and then had to
wait until it was transmitted again.

I: Checking for duplicate EPG records is now faster and also more
efficient: it results in fewer disk accesses. As a result, the
overall CPU-usage of the EPG code has been significantly reduced.
This should reduce some pixelation problems. Memory usage of the code
has been reduced by 50%, leaving more space for other applications.

B: When a commit to dbepg.dat fails, relook blocked itself from further
accessing EPG-data effectively disabling all EPG functions until next
reboot.

I: When the EPG write thread fails to save data because the database is
locked, the data is no longer discarded but the write is retried
later. As a result less data is lost. A locked database occurs
when Internet EPG is locking the database, and when the user
executes a long-lasting EPG search.

I: When tuning to a new channel, EPG for that channel will appear
faster because it is now inserted in the front of the EPG write
queue rather than at the end of the queue.

I: Channel EPG now notices when new EPG data arrives and updates the
screen accordingly.

I: The EPG code has been completely rewritten. All configuration files,
such as mhw_tp_list, have been replaced by a database table
NITEpgInfo. Transponders listed in this table are scanned before
all other transponders. The scan order is determined by a Priority
column. Specific transponders can be disabled altogether by
inserting them into NITEpgInfo and setting the EpgDisable column
to an appropriate value. Transponders for Premiere, TPS, Digital+,
Canaal Digitaal, TV Vlaanderen and some important German networks
have been added.

If for any reason NITEpgInfo is empty or contains the wrong transponders
you will still get EPG data for your favorite channels but it will take
longer

I: EPG records are now updated when their story length is larger than the
the story in the database.

I: OTV EPG has been added. This offers up to 7 days of detailed EPG
data on TPS. The mapping of TPS channel numbers to specific channels
on specific transponders is stored in a database table EpgMap because
a better solution was not available. Please note that data for some
channels does not seem to be transmitted all the time.

I: MHW2 has been added. This offers up to 7 days of detailed EPG
data on most Digital+ channels (most notably not Taquilla).

N: The DGS list EPG has been disabled since it offers less functionality
than channel EPG.

B: Crash in channel EPG. After pressing the "check"-button in the channel
EPG on the current channel, relook goes to live mode. The next time
channel EPG was activated, relook crashed. This was because channel
EPG was not properly closed in this case.

B: Scroll bar in channel EPG was not updated correctly.

B: Channel EPG crashed when channel list was sorted by provider.

B: Attempting EPG-search made relook crash.

B: The results from the EPG search screen displayed the wrong time and
program titles.

B: End and start offset were sometimes added twice when editing
recording schedules.

B: Premiere subfeed EPG data was not gathered correctly because premiere.c
associates the Premiere sport portal PID with Premiere direkt.

B: Relook crashed in mhwepg.c because of a null pointer dereference.

B: Relook crashed when EPG search returned no records.

B: Icon for "Scroll description" showed left-right arrows instead of top/bottom.

Channel list and channel changing
---------------------------------
I: Automatic channel renumbering (from DGS 2.11) has been disabled,
since most users do not like that.

I: Worst-case channel changing speed has been improved. Channel
changing was sometimes blocked when the EPG code was waiting
for a table that was never broadcast. Channel changing was also
blocked for a long time after tuning to a channel with no signal.

B: Relook crashed when sorting channels by sat. This was caused by
the insertion of zero-ids during database upgrade. The code is
now robust against such errors.

B: On encrypted channels the "ecm_pid list is full" appears sometimes. For
instance on TPS. Despite the error, the channel decrypts. Duplicate
ecm_pid's are no longer registered. A warning message is displayed instead.

B: Picture freeze. When changing channels manually, or when the
EPG code tuned to a different transponder, picture freeze occurred
sometimes. This bug was traced to the i2c code by NeumoTeam and
fixed by DGS.

B: Relook sometimes did not display a picture after a channel change. The
audio is played fine. This has the same cause as the picture freeze
bug.

B: When the EPG write list was full, relook locked up completely.

B: While browsing the channel list, the application might crash
when using page-down to go to (past) the bottom and then using up to
move up again.

Recordings and playback
-----------------------
I: The "stop recording" GUI now shows longer channel names and it also
includes the names and start times of the programs being recorded.
In the old dialog sometimes two recordings could not be distinguished.

I: The color of recordings in the record plan has been changed to
white for improved readability.

I: In the recording list, pressing the info button displays the
story (if available) of the recording. This screen can now be
removed by pressing the info button again.

I: Relook again asks for confirmation before deleting a recording (was
removed by DGS).

I: The EPG record for a recording is not only stored in the database,
but also in the filesystem. This allows media_info in db.dat to be
recreated in case db.dat is lost.

I: Undeletion of accidentally deleted files is made easier as follows:
the index-file is no longer deleted but renamed and the media_info
record of the deleted recording is saved in a table
deleted_media_info for some time.

You can undelete as long as you did not press the power button:
1. rename the dead.program and dead.program.index files to their
correct name: "mv dead.long_file_name long_file_name".
2. copy the record from deleted_media_info to media_info using
SQL commands.

I: Names of recorded files now include the year in addition to month and day.

I: When entering a new reservation or recording manually, a message box
with the text "please wait" used to appear. The slow behavior was
caused by the creation of a combo-box for every single channel in the
database (radio and TV) which is very slow. Now this action only
occurs if you change the channel of the recording or reservation.

B: Relook crashed when pressing the info button twice to display EPG
details during playback.

B: When recording "until end of program", the question box ("120
minutes or until end of program") remained on the screen.

B: Relook did not shut down after a recording.

B: Relook crashed when pressing the info button twice during playback of a
recording that was made "manually" (i.e., not from an epg record).

B: Pressing and holding the fast forward (<<) and fast rewind (****)
keys in time-shift or playback mode, to jump forward or backward
only worked once until the live banner disappears.

B: Pressing the pause and play key (which jumps to the next bookmark)
only worked once until the live banner disappears.

B: Recordings started via EPG or REC-button didn't end on time. Note:
a similar (rare) bug may still be present. This part of the code
will be rewritten in a future version to deal with other recording
related problems.

B: In the recording list screen, pressing the stop button should stop
any file playback. When a recording is in progress and no file is
being played, the stop button brought up the "stop recording" dialog,
which does not function correctly in this case. This has been changed
so that only playbacks are affected.

B: In the recording list menu, pressing the lock icon and typing a
password (0000) made relook crash.

B: When stopping a recording manually, relook sometimes crashed while
inserting a record into media_info.

Live mode
---------
B: Live banner now shows the correct name of the program when it is being
recorded.

B: EPG display also works in banner mode 2.

B: A message box appeared saying that the channel is scrambled appeared
when it was not.

B: In time-shift mode, the pause, fast forward and rewind keys now work
correctly (see "recording and playback").

Upgrade and software installation
---------------------------------
I: ipkg has been added. It will be used to install Geckow, Internet EPG,
PHP and Perl.

B: Image upgrade via HTTP has been supported for a while now. Virtual hosts
are now correctly supported.

B: Database upgrade updates sat_id's. In some cases, the new sat_id becomes
0, leading to memory corruption. This bug helps trigger another bug that
makes relook crash when channels are ordered by satellite.

N: The database schema has changed. You will not be able
to use PC editor until it supports the new schema 1.18.

USB-mode
--------
B: Entering USB-mode resulted in a panic.

Setup and menus
---------------
I: Time-zones are now controlled using standard Linux time-zone files.
The time-zone is now only determined by the symbolic link
/var/etc/localtime and is no longer also stored in the database, which
solves the problem that some GUI screens displayed a different time than
others in some cases and all the EPG-related problems.

Users can select the time-zone using the local-time setup screen. Users
in central Europe should use "CET" as the time-zone. This zone will
automatically switch to and from daylight savings time

The "daylight savings time" setup option has been removed since it was
confusing should no longer be needed.

N: It is not clear if the first recording after DST change will actually
work. Wait and see.

B: Relook crashes when entering USALS menu.

B: The help line in "ipsetup" was not shown correctly after using the
virtual keyboard from DDNS setup.

B: The help line in "NeumoTeam Settings (HDD)" was not shown
correctly. If you opened another menu first, you saw the help
line of the old menu.

B: Pressing the arrow key when the cursor was on on the last line in
Local Time menu, the cursor didn't jump on the first line again,
but added another Time-line to the menu.

B: Some NeumoTeam-settings were not saved correctly: send DiseqC (never);
use free tuner if scrambled (never); front panel display
(sometimes); led-status in standby (sometimes).

B: Key 0 also runs a script in addition to keys 1-9

Front panel
--------------------
I: Accented characters in channel names such as Téva, Première,
France ô, ... are no longer displayed as blanks on the led front
panel, but as the corresponding non-accented characters. This
should work for most but not all accented characters.

B: If in NeumoTeam Settings (general) the "Front panel display" is "Channel
number", the front panel shows the channel nr. right in live, but in
recording mode the front panel shows "rec + channel NAME" instead of
"rec C..." (channel-nr):

Plugins
-------
I: Plugin menu now shows metadata (authors, description etc.).

B: The help lines in all plugins were not displayed correctly. Some
plugins crashed. The standard plugins Pong and Sudoku have been fixed.

N: Related to the just mentioned bug: All plugins need to be recompiled
because of a change in help_message.c. Otherwise they will crash.

B: The ts_rec plugin did not work correctly because some ecm_pid's
remained registered.

Miscellaneous
----------------
I: The following "standard" linux configuration files have been introduced
and the most important ones can be edited.
/etc/hosts /etc/protocols

I: image loading and unloading (in the gui) has been improved to be more
robust against coding errors.

I: dropbear uses a different random device and no longer hangs waiting
for entropy if no keys are being pressed.

I: nptd has been included. It can synchronize your clock very accurately.
Make sure you use the "manual" time-setting in the relook setup menu
when using ntpd.

I: syslog now starts automatically on boot. The log can be read using logread.

I: dmesg is now included to read the console log from a virtual console.

Geckow
------
The following bugs are fixed in the Geckow version in svn

B: Geckow did not obey "record start offset" and "record end offset"
(the solution is implemented in the database, not Geckow)

B: When /var/media/video contains symlinks. Geckow does not display
the list of recorded files.

Improvements for developers
---------------------------
I: Source can be compiled on MacOSX. Patches for this are available.

I: Console output prompt has been changed to be less confusing
for debuggers that interpret messages on stderr.

I: All freed pointers are zeroed which makes it easier to detect
memory bugs.

I: By creating the file /var/.savelog, relook will no longer send debug
messages to the serial console, but rather to a file in /var/media/log.
Users without serial console should use this option to gather the
debug messages when they experience a problem. They can then send
them to developers

I: [describe installation of debug version of application]

B: Source failed to compile when HOST was set in the environment.

Known issues (not fixed)
------------------------
B: Lip sync problems on encrypted channels.

B: The layout of multi-channel EPG is confusing and sometimes shows programs
at the wrong start time.

B: In IP-Setup after changing the IP address manually the field with the
IP address is first updated when pressing submit button. It should
be immediately after entering a new IP.

B: Relook crashes when the slide show reads bad data from the disk. The
problem occurs in vid_write_mpeg_file and may be in a binary module.

B: Softcam sometimes suddenly fails with the error "DemuxSectioncallback():
Error - Section Filter length =0"

B: On Filmfour, when there is a long pause in conversation the subtitle for
the next spoken sentence sometimes appears up to 10 seconds to early. At
a certain point it disappears again (timeout), before even the sentence
is spoken.

N: EPG search (e.g., yellow button in grid EPG) can take a very long time.
There should be some way to abort the search if it takes too long.

N: NeumoTeam auto-start time option has been removed because it
complicated the EPG code and is now less needed because the EPG
code works better during normal operation. An equivalent DGS option
("Wake up" in "User's options") can turn on your relook at a desired time.
After you activate it, go to the "record plan" and set the duration to
the desired value.

This mode will allow EPG transponders to be scanned, but not in the
same way as the deleted Neumo-code. For users with loop-though LNB's
only some transponders will be scanned. We plan to solve this in
a later version.

N: Audio language should be selectable when recording.

N: Subtitle language (or enabling/disabling subtitles) should
be selectable when recording.