Support wishlist

These are the elements that we don't have particularly strong skills to build, but would greatly enhance the user experience under videdot. Everything here is something that's a little off the core track for this project, so will only really happen using others' efforts.

Not in any particular order:

Bluetooth

To lose this quaint, 20th-century, terribly-70s need for infra-red remotes. We could do away with needing a dedicated widget to controlling each piece of A/V gear and proffer, say, a programmatic interface to someone's phone, PDA or favoured widget.

See Salling's Clicker for the Mac for an example of this concept. BeOS has always had integrated messaging and scripting, we should offer more access to that.

DVB support

Beginning with DVB-T (and possibly -S and less so -C) cards, for free-to-air services. Beyond that, supporting Conditional Access modules for DVB-{C,S,T} subscription television.

The Linux support for these cards and devices - typically PCI, sometimes quick USB - is quite advanced. Porting this work to Be-ish systems would be a great first step.

Update (25^th November 2004): IsComputerOn reports that Mad Scientist are about to go into beta-testing with a driver for the Hauppage Nova-T 928 DVB-T PCI card. I have no more information about what sort of support the driver offers, or the licensing terms.

Update (29^th November 2004): Thanks to a weekend break in Germany, I now have my sticky hands on the appropriate card, so will be sure to integrate what I can into videdot.

Liberated digital set top boxes

Would that we could talk to our digital devices over a reliable connection to ask themto change channels or to retrieve meta-information about available channels and programming. Beyond that, if they supplied the raw encoded audio and video data without losing quality in digital-analogue-digital conversions, everything would be much cleaner.

At the moment we are often left shooting infra-red signals in through the front of the box, since cable companies like NTL in the UK have instructed Pace to not enable the IR-Blast port on the back.