rdsd 0.0.1

rdsd is a library for the development of software for receive, decode, and display RDS (Radio Data System) data transmitted by analog radio stations. Data includes station name, time, radio text, or traffic messages (TMC). As the latter is used by car navigation systems, RDS will exist for several more years, despite the growing importance of digital radio.

The API for the reception of RDS data is described in the V4L2 specifications since several years. But only since the saa6588 module appears in kernel 2.6.14, the use of the RDS interface is actually possible.

In this project, the whole chain of software was planned and developed: With the saa6588 kernel module, the daemon rdsd, the client library librds, and the user application rdsquery, all necessary components are available now.

The project demonstrates pretty well the possibilities of Linux and OpenSource. A client-server sytem that receives RDS data from several radio cards and distributes them to several clients has never been available as free software before. Such a system becomes only possible through a driver concept like the Video4Linux-API. In this form, it is only possible under Linux.

The Radio Data System Daemon is a daemon that reads raw RDS data from one or more input sources, decodes it, and serves the results to clients that can connect via TCP/IP or a unix domain socket.