Comments on: Watching Freeview (DVB-T) TV with VLC Player on Ubuntu

By: Rambles of Ev » Blog Archive » Watching Freeview (DVB-T) TV with VLC Player on Ubuntu – david winter

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:48:46 +0000

[...] via Watching Freeview (DVB-T) TV with VLC Player on Ubuntu – david winter. [...]

By: bobo

bobo — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:29:57 +0000

can i use my analog TV tuner the same way? Can you post what you have in channels.conf?

By: Israel S

Israel S — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:11:08 +0000

ubuntu karmic 9.10; /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/ to be correct but i can't find Canada or even USA inside the folder. sudo apt-get install dvb-apps (since dvb-utils is not available in Karmic) I have Bell Tv at home (i live in Canada), i needed to watch tv in my computer aswell. TvTime works though, but i want it to give VLC a try :)

Thanks for the guide though, cheers....

By: John

John — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:02:05 +0000

Aiden: Did you get channel 10 to work, I had to install kaffeine from karmic to get channel 10 to come up using an au-Auto scan, but then sound fails to work on HD channels….

By: Aiden Deem

Aiden Deem — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:09:00 +0000

For those having trouble finding the dvb-t directory for scan, may find that the directory is /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/au-SunshineCoast. I easily found the transmitter (au-SunshineCoast) for my location in Australia. I am using Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04.

I could not get mythtv to add channels for the ABC network in my locality. After setting the channel scan to not time out via mythtv backend setup, it would lock but terminated with the error "no tables". VLC does indeed lock onto and play ABC perfectly!

By: bugrit

bugrit — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:20:46 +0000

Great! VLC’s got a graphic equaliser! :))

By: bugrit

bugrit — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:17:22 +0000

I came here because I was hoping to discover how to record Freeview broadcasts using Totem, or xine, or some other player. I have now added VLC to the list and I'm still getting to grips with it. My version of VLC is 0.9.9a Grishenko and it doesn't have a File menu, although its Media menu seems to fulfil most of a typical File menu's functions. However, by pointing Playlist->Load Playlist at my channels.conf file, I was able to Playlist->Show Playlist and select a TV channel, playable in a resizeable window.

My channels.conf was created by w_scan and it's exactly the same one that xine uses, as described in my post of about an hour ago.

I still can't record anything, though.

By: bugrit

bugrit — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:04:20 +0000

In the preceding post, please ignore my reference to mounting Knoxx – it’s my “somewhere safe” for stuff I don’t want to lose when I re-install Ubuntu or XP.

By: bugrit

bugrit — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:00:08 +0000

Apologies if the following procedures have already been discussed but these are the notes I made for myself after getting Totem and xine playing Freeview. I’m a newbie and I made the notes after re-installing Ubuntu for the nth time, having messed up one thing or another so this might help others going through similar experiences. Here goes:

“According to http://projects.gnome.org/totem/ [quote] GStreamer

You will need gst-plugins-bad 0.10.6, as well as Fluendo’s MPEG demuxer to have playback working. The channels.conf file should be named ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf. [/quote]

Instal wscan if it isn’t already installed, instructions here: http://edafe.org/vdr/w_scan/

To retune, mount Knoxx, then in Terminal:

sudo w_scan -X >> ~/chans.txt

Now go and edit ~/chans.txt and sort it into your preferred order, eg BBC1, BBC2, ITV, etc. before you copy it to where it will do some good.

For Totem: sudo cp ~/chans.txt ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf

For xine:

sudo cp ~/chans.txt ~/.xine/channels.conf

Scanning is a bit of a pain so copy chans.txt somewhere safe and then zap w_scan.”

By: Matthew Tompsett

Matthew Tompsett — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:07:34 +0000

Great guide. I generated my channels.conf file using w_scan with the -X option because scan program didn’t seem to work for me. But the rest of the guide worked perfectly.