yaVDR: Managing your VDR channel list - Easier than ever with yaVDR 0.4

September 05, 2011

11:37 AM CEST

Managing your VDR channel list - Easier than ever with yaVDR 0.4

How much fun do you normally have while re-sorting your channel list? Digital TV providers offer their customers hundreds of TV channels and radio stations. At some point almost every person who receives digitial TV has to fiddle with re-sorting some of these channels. This can cause major frustration because the on-screen menus of Set Top Boxes or TVs with built-in receivers often seem to be designed without the urge to win usability awards. Have you ever tried to move a channel from position 2847 to position 7 using the remote control? And after that, to move another channel from position 2846 to position 8? It's as much fun as playing Tetris while the blocks are only dropping by one line per minute.

Even within the open source PVR world it's a challenge to offer a solution with decent usability. But this is going to change soon: Upcoming yaVDR 0.4 will assist you with your channel list in quite a clever way. Let's have a look at the all new channel list editor in the yaVDR web frontend and its built-in access to Channelpedia, the new VDR channel list directory.

While the new channel editor will help you to sort and group your channels quickly and efficiently (it even includes drag and drop and a clipboard), Channelpedia tries to save you from the need to find or create an initial channel list for your DVB provider. Prior to Channelpedia, you had to do a manual channel scan of your DVB provider by using

either w_scan on the command line
or vdr-plugin-wirbelscan via the On-Screen Display of VDR.
Or you had to search for a current VDR channel list on the web.

Any of these ways would take you up to 30 minutes.

Channelpedia now tries to offer you up-to-date channel lists that are also pre-sorted by a set of pre-defined rules to make it easier for you to find the channels you are looking for. Channelpedia is a web application written in PHP and can be extended by new DVB providers. The quality of the Channelpedia service relies on different VDR users who volunteer to let their own channel list being uploaded to Channelpedia on a regular basis.

If you are interested to see a demo about the channel editor and the Channelpedia access, please have a look at the following video. You might want to increase the quality setting to HD and put the video to Fullscreen mode to make it easier to read the text within the video.