Known Bugs and Problems

Here comes the unordered and probably incomplete list of known problems - please refer to the installation notes, too:

• Since .NET is managed it takes some work from the developer. This may be good during development but may be hell when the application is running. I would like to mention here only two of the possible performance issues: first there is the garbage collection which - without special configuration which is not included in WTVP.NET - may run when it wants and how long it wants. This may introduce some problems when the DVB application is recording and needs any bit of power not to break the data stream. Second I'm not sure how the performance comes up when installing PID filters - the sample plug-in provides code for AC3 filtering when Pro Sieben is the active channel.
• During installation the dialog requesting the path to the Watch TV Pro executable is modal but not relative to the installation main window. This may have some funny and unexpected effects - at worst the dialog is opened behind the installer window and at first invisible.
• Always uninstall before installing WTVP.NET.
• Looking at the Watch TV Pro log file you can see that there are a couple of new DLL entries a plug-in is asked for. Since neither the sample plug-in has some code for these nor did I get helpful response from the thread I started in the forum the WTVP.NET is currently restricted to the V1.60 Beta sample plug-in state.
• From the entries a plug-in could support at this state I decided not to investigate in the entries which use native MFC classes (CRuntimeClass). Although I think that there could be a possiblity for a wrapper technology compared with my time left for this project I regarded the possible gain as too low. There is another thread in the Watch TV Pro forum on this issue.
• A third thread in the forum discusses the problem of colliding menu identifiers between different plug-ins. Now end of September 2007 there is no automatic solution. So the BaseMenuID has to be choosen with care.
• A WTVP.NET can only execute on a client system which has the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed.