Ideas for plugins

[sub]

Below are some ideas for plugins. If no one decides to take these tasks on I'll eventually get to them myself, but if other developers can take on these tasks we'll see these features alot sooner.

Feel free to add to the list.

[sub]

DVD Ripper. I'm picturing a screen that could rip DVD to the hard disk. It would probably ask you to put in a disc, select a few options including maybe asking for a directory name, then show progress updates as it ripped the DVD to an mpeg2 on the hard disk. There is lots of example code on the net using things like DeCSS for doing exactly this.

[sub]

Weather Screen. Enough said. Pretty simple but seems quite popular.

[sub]

Commercial detection. Not really a plugin, but we need some logic to auto detect commercials. This logic would spend an hour or so scanning through the mpg looking for signs of commercial breaks, and storing these cut points in a text file called something like originalmoviename.mpg.cuts

Because its not possible to detect commercials in the original compressed mpg, I would image it would involve the development of a new directshow renderer or tranformer filter that would be plugged into a graph after the mpg decoder. It would receive the decoded mpeg frames, and look for "signs" of a commercial. We may want to allow for an extensible set of signs, initially developing one that can look for faded blank periods with no audio (with standard times between blanks of 2 or 3 minutes). In future we could extend this to look for logos etc. This is the way MythTV does it.

We could come up with some logic to run this in the background at a low priority for newly recorded files.

[sub]

Also not really a plugin, but we need some sort of virtual keyboard for remote control users. I need something like this on the manual recordings screen to collect a name for the file, but this could useful on lots of screens.

This would be implement similar to the normal plugin interface. This would need to have methods to do the following
- Render()
- OnKeyPress()
- OnClick()
- OnDoubleClick()
- GetTypedValue()
- CheckForExit() returning values like VIRTUALKB_NOT_YET, VIRTUALKB_EXIT_OK, VIRTUALKB_EXIT_CANCEL

[sisuomin]

Nice ideas!
What about a plugin for basic video editing. E.g. while watching a recording from Music Television, it would be nice to cut video when song starts and stops.

[sub]

I cant see why not...

[defuicus]

I would be glad to help, but I need more info to get start...

Any documentation would be nice. what is the develop environment? basicly, i need some instructions on how to get started.

Thanks

[sub]

I've developed GB-PVR using .net (specifically C#). Plugins could be developed using C#, VB(.net) or managed C++.

Basically to write a menu plugin you need to write a class that implements a specific interface. This interface is described in one of the recents posts.

 http://gbpvr.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=1;t=54

This contains a brief description of the interface, and shows a simple class that implements this plugin interface.

Some of the other things like commercial detection might be implemented in native C++ or C, and a probably best writen as class or set of classes with a test harness for calling them.

[Dai]

I''m going to have a go at a plugin to display some information about disk usage, including an estimate of the remaining recording time on the disk.

If that goes OK, I'll maybe look at the virtual keybord idea.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Dai