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Kvdrmon - what's that?

Kvdrmon is a little KDE kicker application used to monitor a running VDR somewhere in the LAN. This allows the get informations about activities of a VDR running on a headless computer.
Features

This little KDE kicker applet monitors the VDR video recorder. It creates an icon in the KDE system tray showing some informations about the VDR:

  • The current state (playing, recording, idle)
  • The time of the next scheduled recording(s) or the time to this recording(s)
  • A tooltip displays the name(s) of the running recording(s)
  • The tray icon shows disk usage if we run out of space
  • A window pops up if a recording has started or finished

And also

  • You can select sound files for playing on started or finished recordings and for playing on disk space problems
  • Multiple clients can connect to the vdrmon plugin
  • The applet can shutdown the own computer after the current/next recording has finished

Installation

The program consists of two parts:

  • vdr-kvdrmon: This is a helper VDR plugin kvdrmon is communicating with. It runs on the same machine as VDR.
  • kvdrmon: This is the KDE kicker applet. It runs on the machine with the KDE desktop and talks to the vdr-kvdrmon plugin using TCP/IP.

Download

The following files you must download (Gentoo users see below):

  • vdr-kvdrmon-X.tgz
  • kvdrmon-X.tgz

where X is the number of the version to download.

Download location: http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/list_files/kvdrmon

Installation

  • Install the vdr-kvdrmon plugin as any other VDR plugin on your VDR machine.
  • To compile the kvdrmon applect you can do the following steps:
$ mkdir /path/to/tmpdir
$ cd /path/to/tmpdir
$ tar xvfz /path/to/kvdrmon-X.Y.tgz
$ cd kvdrmon-X.Y
$ cmake .           <-- Note the "." parameter
$ make
$ su
# make install
#

This will install the executable and the icons into /usr/local.

Test

  • Restart vdr. telnet vdr-host 2011 should give some output.
  • Now you can give kvdrmon a try. Simply start kvdrmon & and the tray icon should appear.
  • If you have VDR running on another machine you should take a look inside kvdrmon's configuration.

For Gentoo users

Download and copy the ebuild files for the version wanted to your local portage tree. So you can install both parts as usual.

Known Bugs

The current version is the first version for KDE-4. It contains some bugs which I want to track down in the next time:

  • The tooltip contains repeated entries
  • The tooltip contains also finished recordings which should not be showed
  • The applications crashes sometimes when the KDE session is closed