DVB-t reception and playback with a USB stick?

English Multimedia
1

Hey all,

first post on the forums here.

So I have 13.2 up and running, smooth as a knife through butter. I needed to buy a DVB-t stick for TV reception during our move. It works on Windows just fine. I know there are some solutions like MythTV and XawTV. But as of yet I didn’t figure out how to get a signal into one of these solutions.

Does anyone have pointers in the right direction? Or can someone suggest a DVB-t solution to watch TV on Linux in general?

Cheers
Marcus

2

At least xawtv only supports analog devices, AFAIK. Don’t know about mythtv.

Try Kaffeine, that has pretty good DVB support.
It is available in the standard repos, and should even be installed by default.

But you need to have additional codecs installed (from Packman, libxine2-codecs in particular) for digital tv to work…

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Sounds good… will try that. Cheers mate

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I use Kaffeine for DVB-T (Freeview UK) and DVB-T2 (Freeview UK HD). Both fine provided rooftop aerial has decent reception, as is the case with a television. Only issue with HD is that Kaffeine can’t pick up the full EPG (TV guide) for HD channels, only picks up times but not programme names, so you have to check listings elsewhere and set up recordings manually (can’t create recording for programme without a name). Make sure your DVB-T card has linux drivers, check the linux TV wiki site.

5
  • Unfortunately development on kaffeine 4 stopped ages ago. Nonetheless, it works pretty good for the state it was left in.
  • Me TV is another standalone dvb viewing app that you might want to look at. It has guide data, but I can’t comment upon how robust that is (as I don’t really utilize that)
  • the linuxttv wiki also includes a list of some other alternative programs. Its likely a non exhaustive listing, and other (newer) apps may now exist
6

That’s not true.

The maintainer stepped back about a year ago, but it has a new maintainer meanwhile.
A new version 1.3 has been released two weeks ago. It uses VLC as backend now instead of Xine, that porting work has already been started (and mostly finished) by the old maintainer.

I packaged 1.3 here if somebody wants to try it:
http://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Awolfi323%3Abranches%3AKDE%3AExtra&package=kaffeine

The packages is not ready yet for submission to the distribution (e.g. the translations are still missing), but it works fine.

7

Ah, well, its excellent to hear that someone has picked up its development.

However, I stand by my comment. Active development had languished for a while and Christoph eventually made his announcement to pull away in Dec 2013 (see Kaffeine's future) … IIRC, his “real life” included a new job and baby, as well as dwindling interest (…I seem to recall him expressing being tired of unappreciative end users that demanded this and that should just work blah blah blah, as well as the stupid conspiracy theories and attacks upon him about the switch from ver 3 to ver 4). The kaffeine web page (including users forums) disappeared (as far as I recall/know) a few months after that announcement. And the KDE project page (see Multimedia / Kaffeine · GitLab) had clearly stated that the project was inactive pretty much ever since. The only commits in the time period since then that I recall were from “script kiddy”.

Christoph had done the VLC work a long time ago. He had also first attempted a mplayer backend but was unsatisfied with the result of that and had decided to go the vlc route instead. Unfortunately, that goal remained in limbo. Though its nice to see that someone (Lasse Lindqvist evidently) may have taken it upon themselves to kick start things again

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Yes, I know about that mail.
In my memory it was “about a year ago” though, sorry.
I even thought about taking over the maintainership myself back then… :wink:

Christoph had done the VLC work a long time ago.

Right, that’s what I wrote.
I checked the git repo now, and actually there was no new commit at all regarding the VLC support.
Lasse did some other feature work though, like making it possible to configure the file names of recordings.

Actually, I probably will wait for a 1.3.1 release anyway before I consider submitting the package to the distribution.
There have been some (real) commits already since the 1.3 release.

Personally I have to say, I’m a bit split about this though.
For me, Kaffeine always was a KDE frontend to Xine (yes, I know that there has been a gstreamer backend too in KDE3 times), and that was my main reason for actually using it. Although meanwhile, I mainly care about the DVB support.
I do have a video file (a special from an original audio CD I possess) where VLC (and Kaffeine 1.3) doesn’t play the sound correctly, but Xine (or Kaffeine 1.2) does. I guess I should finally write that bug report against VLC… :wink: