ExternalRecorder - multiple channels?

[ubu]

I have the ExternalRecorder plugin set up to play an mms stream using VLC on channel 84. I would like to set up several channels, each pointing to a different URL. It looks like the only way to do this is to set up a separate capture source for each channel (since the URL is hard coded in the parameters to VLC on the config screen). Is there a way to have the URL be replaceable in the capture source parameters and then associate different channels within that source with the different URLs? I see mention of a {channel} string but that looks like it uses the channel number rather than it's name. (If it was the name, I could use the URL string as the channel name). Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here.:confused:

[ubu]

Well, it doesn't look like anyone else is interested in doing this but, just in case, I printed out the parms that get passed to the external progam and, sadly, {channel} gets replaced by the channel number not the name, so there's no way to fool ExternalRecorder into passing a URL to the external program. Why anybody would want to use the channel number as part of their parm list rather escapes me, I'm afraid.

Sad, because it would be a very neat solution to my objective of integrating web TV and broadcast/cable TV into one seamless gbpvr interface. I had hoped to have one capture source pointing to VLC with a bunch of channels representing the majority of stations I watch on the internet (mainly mms streams), another capture source pointing to RealPlayer (or maybe mplayer) to watch the handful of stations that use ram or rm files for their streams and another one pointing to Winamp to play the Shoutcast nsv streams. Creating a separate capture source for each station works OK if you just watch one or two web stations but not a practical solution for a serious number of channels.

I'd think about writing a new plugin but it seems a bit daft to duplicate all the existing functionality of ExternalRecorder just to get around this one little problem.

Does anybody else think this would be a useful capability? Anybody else like to watch BBC World, WebRanger TV, WAM TV, Deutsche Welle, Ministry of Sound, NASA TV, etc.?