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Support for RadioText / Dynamic Label Segment / "Now Playing" information to provide chapter markings in recordings.

Added by Richard Carr over 8 years ago

Hello everybody, this is my first post so be gentle with me.
It goes without saying, but tvheadend is awesome!!1! I've been using it for over a year now and it's gotten really rock solid with plenty of nifty features. One feature I've been using a lot is the DVR for recording weekly radio shows, syncing them with my phone (after transcoding) and listening to them much later on as pseudo podcasts.

Most of the shows I listen to consist of music tracks but include the occasional news & weather segments and inane chit-chat in between. While listening to one of these mildly irritating interruptions it made me wonder if it was technically possible to insert chapters/bookmarks into the audio file so that you could skip a segment if you didn't want to listen to it. Also, it would just be really handy to see what the song name and artist of the currently playing track is.

I've had a bit of a web crawl to see if this or something similar has been implemented in some way by tvheadend or A.N Other project but found nothing. Wikipedia refers to the "Now Playing" artist track title info as "RadioText" or "Dynamic Label Segment". A search for those terms came back with a rather detailed (and overwhelming to a digital radio tech novice) ebook on the subject of Digital Audio Broadcasting . It mentions:

"The tagging information is carried in DL Plus command messages of type 'DL Plus Tags', immediately following the associated DAB Dynamic Label message. An item Toggle Bit allows various pieces of information to be correctly assigned (spanning multiple DL Plus Command messages) per program item (e.g. a song or show). The Item Running Bit can be used for example to indicate the temporary interruption of an item (e.g. a tagged show being briefly interrupted by news)."

I suppose these markers would somehow have to be inserted into the recorded file somehow as well, if that's even possible? Also, I'm not even sure the markers are sent at the exact beginning of the track as the info always seems to turn up a fair few seconds after the music has started on my regular DAB radio.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my post and hopefully it might be possible :)

tl;dr - Would it be possible to use digital radio "now playing" information to insert chapters into recorded files and include individual track metadata?