README

This is a "plugin" for the Video Disk Recorder (VDR).

Written by:                  Christoph Haubrich <christoph1.haubrich (AT) arcor.de>
Project's homepage:          http://firefly.vdr-developer.org/systeminfo/
Latest version available at: http://firefly.vdr-developer.org/systeminfo/

See the file COPYING for license information.


Description:
------------
This plugin for Klaus Schmidinger's Video Disc Recorder VDR displays system
informations like CPU type and speed, disk and swap space etc. It uses the output
of an external script (systeminfo.sh) which can be freely customized to the
personal needs.


Installation
------------
The systeminfo plugin is compiled and installed the same way as any other plugin:
- cd <VDR>/PLUGINS/src
- tar xjf vdr-systeminfo-<version>.tar.bz2
- ln -s systeminfo-<version> systeminfo
- cd ../..
- make plugins

Adapt the example script systeminfo.sh in the subfolder "scripts" to your needs
and configuration, verify that it is execuatable for VDR and copy it to the
default path /usr/local/bin. Alternatively, you could copy the adapted script to
any location you like and pass the location of the script as parameter to the plugin
(see below).

Without adapting the script to your needs you will not receive any usefull results!

You can test the script without vdr by:
   for i in $(seq 1 16); do /usr/local/bin/systeminfo.sh $i;echo;done
Change the "16" to your maximum line number.

Configuration
--------------
The script systeminfo.sh needs to be customized and must be copied to /usr/local/bin
or the path and name of the scipt must be supplied as command line parameter to the plugin.

Script output:
The script is called with incremented numbers until a blank line is returned.
The basic idea behind the format is that a script produces a name/value pair
separated by a tab (\t) for each line:
      "name \t value"

As many values do not occupy a complete line, you can put two values in one line:
      "name \t value \t value".
The screen is devided in three columns for that purpose.

If value consist of "numer1 number1", the plugin interpretes these values as
kilobytes and converts them to MB or GB. These converted values are written in the
2nd column and a progress bar is drawn in the third column.
The first number is interpreted as "total", the second as "current".

If the special keyword "CPU%" is found in the second column, it will be replaced by the
actual cpu usage (which is too complicated to caclulate in a script and therefor
implemented in the plugin).

If in front of the already mentionend string an additional "s\t" appears, this entry is
considered static which means that it will only be evaluted during the first display cycle.
This reduces the load of the machine as cpu type, distribution and kernel version are very
unlikely to change during the display period and therefore are only evaluated once.

Usage:
------
Edit your runvdr (or whatever startup script you use) to load the systeminfo plugin, e.g.
  vdr -Psysteminfo
to use systeminfo with the default settings and start VDR.

The path to the external script can be supplied via command line parameter:
  -s SCRIPT, --script=SCRIPT   optional name and path of system info script
                               (default: '/usr/local/bin/systeminfo.sh')

If you are using the conf.d mechanism you can also use the provided file 50-systeminfo.conf.

Setup Options:
--------------
The following settings are available in the setup->plugins->systeminfo setup menu:
- Refresh intervall (s):     time between two refreshs of the display, 1-20 seconds
- Close display after 2 min: choose wether display is closed after the default VDR
                             timeout of 2 minutes or if it never closes automatically


Credits
-------
The idea and some conecepts for this plugin came from the sysinfo plugin by
kikko77 <kikko77@altervista.org> (http://kikko77.altervista.org)