VideoteXt 0.6 review
DownloadVideoteXt is a videotext/teletext-decoder for PCs running Linux/x86 (of course, it also runs with other Unices, but there are current
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VideoteXt is a videotext/teletext-decoder for PCs running Linux/x86 (of course, it also runs with other Unices, but there are currently no drivers for videotext-cards on these systems). It consists of a device-driver, an interactice frontend using the X-Window-System and the XView-toolkit and a commandline-oriented frontend intended mainly for non-interactive usage.
The XView-version is TOP-text-capable and is able to receive all single pages of a station in advance in a few minutes, so you don't have to wait when you access these pages. Frequently used pages can be put into a hotlist, which will be sought autmatically whenever you switch to a new station. Of course, you can save and load videotext-pages; exporting them in GIF-, PPM-, PNG-, ASCII- and PostScript-format is also possible.
The commandline-version also offers TOP-text support and can output the received pages in different ASCII- and binarThe device-driver is a loadable kernel module for Linux.y-formats suitable for post-processing (with AWK-scripts e.g.).
The device-driver is a module for Linux kernel. A list of supported hardware interfaces is available.
I'm always interested in information about other interfaces -- probably I can add support for them to my driver. However, if I can't get enough information about the hardware, support for them is not very likely. For example, this is the case with all cards using the SAA5284 from Philips, like all newer newer Hauppauge WinTV/PCI cards. Please complain to Hauppauge if you don't like this policy.
If you'd like to buy a new videotext interface, here's a list of vendors of supported videotext interfaces (most of them are in Germany, because that's where I once lived -- if you know of other ones, please tell me).
You can also use VideoteXt without a videotext-interface, e.g. as an external viewer for web browsers if you'd like to build a web-based videotext server. If you want to have a look at VideoteXt before buying an interface, you can do so by reading the example pages included in the VideoteXt package from disk.
What's New in This Release:
Fixed broken 'Reveal'-button
Made VideoteXt accept buggy TOP-text pages broadcast by ARD & ZDF recently
Increased performance of GIF-/PPM-writing routines and added GIF- and PPM-formats to vtxget
Fixed bug in GIF-routines that caused invalid files when writing several pictures per session
Fixed some bugs that could cause coredumps or corrupt config-files when writing to a file fails
Added spooldir-support to VideoteXt
VideoteXt now is able to continue to search for a page in background if not all subpages are complete when you request the page in foreground
Added 'Continue'-togglebutton to be able to control whether VideoteXt continues to search for a page in background
Added 'Stop'-button to cancel a currently running background-search
New dialog-box for copying selected station-settings to other stations
Improved interactive feeling with slow interfaces (though it still doesn't make much fun)
vtxget now can dump the TOP-text-tables in a machine-readable format
vtxget now is able to read page-numbers from stdin, so you can use a named pipe to pass new requests to a vtxget running in the background
Added virtual-row-support to vtxget (preliminary, vtx-format only)
vtxget now also accepts page-ranges
vtxget is now able to reorder the page-requests you give on the commandline if you use the -i switch
Preliminary support for tuners on videotext-cards via tunerctl
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