Hi Daniel, I see that while I was asleep (sleep GOOOD), you received more feedback, so I shall try to respond appropriately to parts of all these mails... On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Daniel Dalton wrote: > Does this mean I have to build the kernel? > If so, how do I get to this part of the setup what's it under in make > menuconfig for example? Not necessarily -- as it turned out, your distribution seems to include all that you needed pre-built for you. However, to answer your question -- as part of the long and tedious process of configuring a new kernel, eventually you will reach an item concerning video and related multimedia devices, or something similar. (It has been years since I last went through a from-nothing kernel configuration, so I remember almost nothing about it.) Your device would be listed as one of the many that are available. Sorry that I am not being more precise -- you do not now need to do this, so I am skipping the details yet offering an overview which may be helpful to you in the future. > > One thing you can do, is to plug your device into the USB port > > (if you haven't done so already), and check the output of > > `lsusb' for your device vendor and product IDs, to see if > > these match those in the source code. > > What source code? The stuff you pasted above? This is no longer important, but you asked, so maybe it can help you in the future... The source code I refer to is that for the linux kernel, and for your device, it would be found in <path-to-your-source>/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-usb in files m920x.* Here you need to replace <path-to-your-source> with whatever the standard is on your system -- it could be /usr/src/linux-2.6.26 or something completely different -- I actually have no experience with the different distributions, because I keep my own copy of Linus' source tree and make snapshots from that. Note that at present, you do *not* need to do this, as your distribution has the binary bits you need. But if your curiosity makes you want to learn more about how you can build a new kernel from source, I am not going to try to stop you -- on the contrary, I will encourage you to learn as much as you like! > > I'm unsure of your level as a beginner, expert, or master of > I'm not bad in a console, but I'm mostly a home user I just use it for > work music browsing the web etc, and know a bit more. I can compile and > patch stuff, and know a tiny bit of c, so thats basically my level. Thanks, I will try to tune my advice to your level, yet perhaps also keep in mind someone who googles up this reply, with a different level of experience... > > > Finally, I'm vission impared, so are there any programs for controling > > Similarly for this reason, someone else will have to offer > > help on convenient end-user applications. (I can offer > > good commandline suggestions, but `gtk' and `qt' have on > > meaning to me) > > Can you recommend any command line programs? I love using the cli, and > if possible I would avoid using gnome. > Can mplayer control the tv? Yes, `mplayer' can do this, but it requires a bit of work and perhaps some understanding. Let me explain the latter... `mplayer' is a wonderful all-purpose swiss-army-knife type of media player, that achieves flexibility, but may not seem as polished to the beginner. The `man' page alone is often enough to cause a beginner's eyes to glaze over and for them to start going ``wibble'' before they even get to the interesting options. Due to the flexibility of `mplayer', it needs to try to determine the one out of many many different video formats which it supports, which takes some time when handling a broadcast stream. This results in very slow channel change times, compared with, say, a good hardware-based consumer product. There are ways to speed this up, because I know that in my experience with broadcast media, I am only going to be seeing (presently) an MPEG Transport Stream from my DVB device, and that will be carrying a payload that will be MPEG 2 video (or maybe H.264), and Layer II or AC3 audio. I have built a small-footprint version of `mplayer' by manually editing the configuration to only include the code for the video, audio, and container formats that I expect to use that version for (in my case, verifying the integrity of recorded broadcast streams, but not actually sending the output to any video display). The other thing which can be done, is to call `mplayer' with the commandline options which tell it what demux to use (mpeg ts) and which video and audio codecs to use, which skips most of the autodetection process. This probably will speed up changing channels, to the speed of dedicated utilities that handle a single format, and essentially instantly start to deliver the output when, in my example, I tune into a multicast audio stream. Now, back to using `mplayer': It works from a list of channels, which you will need to create using a different utility. It then uses simple keyboard input to cycle through the list of channels (I want to think that `k' and something else are used, but I honestly no longer remember), which is not too bad when you have only a few channels available. (Unfortunately, in my experience, older versions of `mplayer' have had some problems with keyboard input in some cases, such as after suspending the program, and perhaps when tuning after coming across more than one radio-only service, if I remember. But I have not built and tried a new `mplayer' for some months...) Read on, as you have already tried without success to get a list of channels... > > Totem, Me-TV, Kaffeine, mplayer, Xine. > > Mplayer works with this card? Great! Also, I have not had experience with the first three applications which Antti listed, but I have used `xine' as well as `vlc', but I cannot remember how well they worked for me. Except for `vlc' trying to listen to the multicast audio stream, where some blasted graphical display was invoked and took more than 100% of my CPU and caused audio dropouts, and I saw no way to disable that eye-candy and drop CPU to a near-zero level even on my ten-year-old machines. > How would I begin configuring it for mplayer then? You need to create a `channels.conf' list of channels that you then place under your ~/.mplayer/ directory. Then if you want to start with a particular channel, you will invoke `mplayer' something like `mplayer dvb://"Channel foo" ' or simply as `mplayer dvb:// ' and then change channels to reach the one of interest. I am going to assume that your distribution already has `mplayer' available, and that it has been built with DVB support. But this may be wrong, and it may be that you need to download the `mplayer' source, configure it to enable DVB support, and then let it build. > On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 12:46:32AM +0200, Antti Palosaari wrote: > > Yes, should work out of the box. No need to install any driver, driver > > is included in your Kernel. > > /dev/dvb/adapter0/ is created. so does this mean the right modules have > been loaded? Yes, everything is fine, and you should not need to do anything building a new kernel or new modules. > > configure. Otherwise you will need initial tuning file and then scan to > > get channels.conf. Try google for more info. > > I've been googling, and have played with w_scan and me-tv. > Kaffeine unfortunately is qt and won't work with braille/speech, but > me-tv does. So I got sighted help to scan for channels in kaffeine, the > scan didn't find any channels. > Next, I ran the w_scan program, and that as well failed to find any > channels. Finally, I ran me-tv and that as well failed. (I selected my > location for me-tv). It may help if you use `scan' which is part of the `dvb-apps' suite of programs. This makes use of an initial tuning file, and there should be one already available for your location. I vaguely remember reading that in Australia, use is made of either an offset to the frequency, or of a bandwidth that is different from the rest of the world, which has led to problems with certain firmware. And in fact, looking at the initial scanfiles available for .au, both appear to be so: # Australia / Melbourne (Mt Dandenong transmitters) # T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy # ABC T 226500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE # Seven T 177500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE # Nine T 191625000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE # Ten T 219500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE # SBS T 536625000 7MHz 2/3 NONE QAM64 8k 1/8 NONE Make certain that you select the correct initial scan file for your location, available as part of the `dvb-apps' package -- here you probably will do best to obtain the latest source via `hg' because the scanfiles may not be up-to-date as included in a distribution, although the binary should be mostly unchanged. > So, how do I get w_scan or me-tv to find some channels? It's probably While I have the `w_scan' source mirrored, I actually have not taken any time to look at it :-) Perhaps it is not able to find frequencies such as the above... > not worth talking about kaffeine as I won't be able to use this. I'm > plugging my usb receiver into a tv connection in my home which a > standard tv would plug into. If you continue to have problems, then later I will ask for information to help troubleshoot -- such as your location, and whether a normal digital TV can receive signals from the same connection. But I am hoping that use of `scan' alone will give you results. > Thanks very much for your help, Happy to help. If I have done anything in my replies that has not worked with your vision, then please do not hesitate to give me feedback, so that I can change my way of thinking. barry bouwsma _______________________________________________ linux-dvb users mailing list For V4L/DVB development, please use instead linux-media@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx linux-dvb@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.linuxtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-dvb
