Linux Multimedia meets DVB

This page contains informations about the dvb multimedia platform, my contributions and informations about my own multimedia applications. I hope to be able to provide tips and hints for creating your own multimedia device as well.

News

Introduction

An introduction to my multimedia vision and linux can be found on my linux page (currently only in german). I have bought a DVB board some time ago when some LUGT members discussed about it and it's programming possibilities (this card has a very good DSP processor). I fetched the software and mainly used it since for watching TV. I wrote soon an RPM spec file for the Linux Mandrake distribution and adapted it to each new released version. Nowadays the driver software runs quite well but there is not much software which actually uses it. The driver contains a tv client and a separated tv channel zapper. Recently a program called DTV was released which is very good for channel searching and tuning and since a longer time vdr, a recording software exist which I still not have tested. Much discussion on the dvb mailing list concerns the file formats for saving the video data, but since release of DTV the channel tuning topic has come back as well.

An FAQ to DVB and VDR can be fount on this page

Contributions

So far I have a patch for the dvb driver which contains changes I needed todo to get the driver running on Mandrake Linux 8.1 Cooker (about august 2001) and some small patches to make some output messages more useful for me concerning the channel searching with the program stest. Here is the patch for the siemens_dvb-0.9.4-2002-04-01 archive (I downloaded it from the vdr page, in case you don't find it).

The spec file for Linux Mandrake Cooker 8.2 (March 2002) was tested with kernel 2.4.18 but should run on 2.4.5 or later Mandrake Kernels as well. When you create the rpm created from this spec file with "rpm -ba < spec-file >" you will need to have the driver archive and the above patch in the SOURCES directory of your rpm directory (/usr/src/RPM). When you install it, the package creates a file for starting up the dvb driver with a simple "/etc/init.d/dvb start" command. Use the command "rpm -ql dvb" to find out where all the programs and the documentation was installed. Here is the spec file. I cannot upload a complete archive or binaries as there are download restrictions from this site. I recommand to beg the linuxtv.org members to upload an rpm archive.

The spec file works for me on Mandrake 9.0 (October 2002). Also you should be able to download a dvb package from Mandrake contrib mirrors soon. Be aware that the driver is now part of the Mandrake kernel (not the native kernel!) so the dvb package only contains libs (probably as libdvb or similar binary package) and the all the programs. I don't know about other distros so it's up to you to beg them to include the package ;-)

As you probably noticed when trying to compile dvb it will now requires lirc to be installed, as this is needed for rtuxzap (and DTV is not very useful without lirc). So I created another SPEC file for it (version 0.6.4) as well. Note that if you have some special IR hardware which cannot be compiled with the configure switch --with-driver=any you need to adapt the spec file.

Hints & Tips

To get the driver running you need at least kernel 2.4.5 in conjunction with dvb-0.9. Older versions of the driver do not work with the 2.4 kernel but require a 2.2.x kernel. I strongly recommand switching to a 2.4 kernel when using the dvb driver as there were many improvements in the last months to this driver. Consequently I did not put up an rpm spec files for older versions of the driver.

To get a list of channels either use the included dvbrc file or better fetch DTV. I cannot recommand tuning with the stest program as explained in the introductury section. The best option to keep uptodate is to use the database feature of the DTV package. I created a spec file for DTV as well which can be found here. The dtv patch (for version 1.1.2) simply contains path adaption as recommanded in the INSTALL file.

Some notes on DTV

I have created a program called dtv-vrcc, a virtual remote control client for dtv. I did this because there was no easy way to use dtv without having a remote control (and I did not succeed with IRDA <-> lirc, but that's another story). This is a very simple program but someone reported to me that it does not work with multiple streams. If I ever get some time I'll try to fix this, but as you have access to the sources you could fix it yourself and send me a patch :-).

Downloads

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