kvdrmon

What's this?

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:

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

The following features are implemented but not tested yet:

If the user starts a system shutdown (or makes a simple logout) the program will warn about running or scheduled recordings.
The command line switch -p for the vdrmon plugin. This selects another TCP port.
Kvdrmon's alive detection sends alive packages to the vdrmon plugin. The plugin sends respond messages back. If for a long time no response was received, kvdrmon disconnects and tries to reconnect. This feature is not needed under normal conditions. But in some cases kvdrmon doesn't detect lost connections.

Date	Version	Changes
31 Mar 2006	0.6	The applet can trigger a shutdown after the running/next recording has finished
03 Dec 2005	0.5	The disk space indicator is a bit more configurable now Tooltip and popup are now using HTML for better readability The disk space information inside the Tooltip shows the needed space for the running and the next scheduled recordings
24 Nov 2005	0.4	The tooltip shows the remaining duration of the running recordings A disk usage indicator is shown if the disk is filled up more than a given percent value The disk usage indicator is flashing if the remaining space is not sufficient for the running and the next scheduled recording(s)
21 Nov 2005	0.3	The tooltip now shows the duration of the recordings
15 Nov 2005	0.2	The tooltip now shows the running recordings
10 Nov 2005	0.1	Initial release

You should use the gentoo.de portage tree. Then you can simply run emerge vdr-kvdrmon on the VDR machine and emerge kvdrmon on the KDE machine.

First download the tarballs vdr-vdrmon-0.6.tgz and kvdrmon-0.6.tar.gz.
Now install the vdrmon plugin as any other VDR plugin on your VDR machine.
Extract the kvdrmon tarball into a directory of your choice on your KDE machine. Now run configure and make install.

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.

Kvdrmon can be configured inside the properties dialog. This can be reached using the context menu of the kicker icon.

You can leave bugs or wishes here.

The applet doesn't communicate with VDR directly. Instead it talks to the "vdrmon" plugin. The plugin is listening on some TCP port (default 2011) and waits for connection requests.
If a client has connected, the plugin immediately sends some status informations. (You can test this with telnet).
Starts or Stops of replaying or recording will be reported by the plugin to the kvdrmon program. Also changes of the next scheduled recording will be posted.

If you wonder why not using SVDRP: I had to reimplement too much code from VDR's timer management ...
The kvdrmon program changes his icon according to the received informations.
The logout/shutdown detection occurs by intercepting close requests to the applet window.