Documentation:dev:preferences

Preferences overview
This is the preferences section. The appropriate dialog can be started by the menu bar or the corresponding key sequence. The button default at the bottom of the dialogue, resets everything to the default values. But only for the active section. So when you are in the analog section and press on default only this setion will be affected. If you want to reset all values at a time you have to use the special button in the advanced section.

For most options the tooltips should provide enough informations to understand what they do.

General section


The general section is for some basic settings. First of all you have to set your language. Currently TV-Viewer is available in english, german and danish. Please visit the page Translate TV-Viewer if you want to provide a translation for a language.

If you want the newsreader to check for news about the project you should activate the corresponding option. You may also choose the interval in days for checks.

To retrieve the TV program you can use an external application. There exist some exactly for this purpose like TV-Browser or nxtvepg. TV-Browser for example can even be used to schedule recordings for TV-Viewer. On the other hand you could also use a web browser with an appropriate web link like

/usr/bin/firefox http://www.tvguide.com/

Analog section
This chapter covers the analog settings, which is very important to get your device to work with TV-Viewer.

On the first you tab you have to select your video device as well as the video standard, frequency table and the standard video input. Choose carefully here, this settings are crucial.

On the second tab you may manipulate the video and audio stream provided by your device. It is highly recommend to leave the video stream bitrate and hardware audio level as they are. Wrong values can result in no audio or video. A useful setting is "Temporal filter". Especially if your picture is blurred, choosing a lower value may correct this.

DVB
Currently there are no options here. DVB support is planned for version 0.9.0 or later.

Video
TV-Viewer uses MPlayer as backend to render the video and display it in the video window. Here you can configure MPlayer. Basic infos are provided by the tooltips. If you want to know more then you have to read through the MPlayer documentation or ask in their IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #mplayer)

Audio
Like in the video section the options here are valid for the MPlayer backend. If you have questions related to the audio options you should read the MPlayer documentation. If you have video but no audio you should try different audio output drivers and activate the option "Do not process MPlayer config files" in the advanced section.



Additionally you can tell TV-Viewer to remember the volume level.

Activate "Auto synchronization" if audio and video is out of sync. If this doesn't work for you, you may also provide a fixed value for it.

Radio
TV-Viewer will support the radio tuner of your device with version 0.8.3

Interface
The first tab of the interface section let's you choose between different themes, you may enable or disable tooltips and so on. This tab should be self explanatory.

The second tab let's you configure some window properties and system tray behavior. For the main window you can choose to start in full-screen mode and to remember size and position.

The floating control is useful in full-screen mode, it will show the selected widgets when the mouse cursor is in a predefined position.

TV-Viewer can have a system tray icon. The icon can be activated in the menubar (TV-Viewer). Here you may may choose to activate "Minimize" and "Close" to tray. If the icon is not resized automatically for your system tray an icon size can be specified here. Please note the system tray icon will only work if you installed tktray which is part of TV-Viewer, but can be deselected during installation.

The next tab deals with the on screen display. The OSD (on screen display) will show different informations like station name, volume level and many more in the video window. You can activate the OSD for windowed or full-screen mode and choose a font, size, style, color and the place where it should appear. There is also a station list which can be invoked by your remote control and be used to choose a different channel. This station list is only available in full-screen mode.

TV-Viewer has its own notification daemon similar to the one provided by dbus. We have the intention to use the dbus notification system in the future but the dbus bindings for Tcl/Tk are not usable at the moment. (De)Activate the daemon here. Additionally you may specify where the window should pop up and how long (in seconds) it will be visible.

Record
This section covers settings for recordings and timeshift. The tooltips should provide enough informations for this options. Be sure to have activated autostart for the scheduler, otherwise your recordings won't occur. On the second tab is an option called "Space to be left free". Here you may provide a value in Megabytes that should be left free of the chosen partition. This prevents timeshift from consuming all your free hard disk space. This option seems to cause problems on some machines and timeshift won't start. In this case set the value to "0", this will deactivate this feature. If you want to save timeshift video files permanently use the floppy icon the control toolbar while in file playback mode.

Advanced
The first tab in the advanced section provides some more MPlayer specific settings as well as a special button to reset everything to default values. The option "Do not process MPlayer config files" may help if there are conflicting settings between MPlayer config files and TV-Viewer. This may result in no audio or video, and can be solved by activating this option. Changing aspect ratio handling is not recommended.

The second tab offers the possibility to supply TV-Viewers MPlayer backend with additional options and values. Informations about these options can be found in the MPlayer documentation.

On the last you can activate / or deactivate the logging of debug, warn and error messages. This files can be observed with the log file viewers. In case of serious errors a dialogue box will pop up, which can be deactivated here.