inear/dvb-tools/util/alevt/README

Hi,

this software is not just a program, it's moreover a legend.
It is THE protagonist of all videotext applications under Linux.

During the past 10 years the video standards, the APIs, the kernel
have seen lots of changes.
But unfortunately this program has NOT seen much maintenance.
The results of that misfit appearance are:

1. lots of forks flying around in the Internet
2. lots of patches flying around, some good, some disgusting, some out of time
3. lots of cruft which is completely outdated or obsolete for other reasons

To handle all that in one big effort I decided to redesign the program
completely, enlarging its capabilities for DVB-S at the same time.

So here are the changes:

1. Erasure of old help pages and rename / reorganize / update the rest
-> redesign of the online help system / implying alevt-date and alevt-cap

2. Erasure of old outdated integers, functions, parameters:

- bell, big_buf, debug, display, editor, erc, fine_tune, newbttv,
- oldbttv

3. Coding style cleanups (no superfluous comments, not more than
   80 characters per column, no uncommented code.

4. No strange characters in the outfile, latin alphabet in purity instead.

5. Alevt can be started in 4 modes now if you are running it in DVB mode:

- by service id (sid)
- by teletext pid (ttpid)
- by channel name
- without parameter

6. Starting it in DVB mode on the command line it presents you
a table with human readable values such as sid, teletext pid,
PMT (Program Map Table), provider name, service name, language, service type.
This makes it easier for you to start multiple teletext windows
in multiple console sessions manually.

If working with a script and the option -o (outfile) you can
also start multiple teletext windows of all channels in a transponder.
I develop a GUI using TCL / TK 8.5 and Iwidgets 4.01 to do that and other
tasks graphically (i. e. by mouse click).

7. If you install the program on the command line by typing "make &
   make install" there is an uninstaller now to revert the installation:
   "make uninstall".

ENJOY IT!

Uwe Bugla, February 11th, 2010.

External dependencies

AleVT needs some system libraries to be installed in your system.
They are zlib, libX11, libpng and libzvbi.

Credits go to:
- Andreas Rottmann from debian.org for compiler fixes and
  other kinds of investigation.
- Francesco Lavra for supplying a kernel patch to avoid kernel demux
  incompatibilities with kernels >= 2.6.32
- Andy Walls for helpful investigation in kernelspace
- Edgar Toernig for providing the source version 1.6.2 and doing all the
  development for the basic versions
- Tom Zoerner for the implementation of libzvbi