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Command line dvb-t
I have two budget dvb-t pci cards in a linux box that I use for saving dvb TV programs and, since I am a minimalist, sometimes viewing in real time using xine. In this brief tutorial I will explain how to access DVB broadcasts on the command line and introduce a bare bones example script that will tune a channel, encode a broadcast on the fly and save it to disk.
You might wonder why in the age of Myth TV would I bother to which I would answer that I'm happy enough to be able to open up a terminal (locally or remotely), type in a command, respond to a couple prompts, and schedule a show to be saved for later viewing. I don't need much more than that.
If you want to try any of this on your own machine you will need to install dvb-apps. If a package is not available for your distro or if you want the latest version go to http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/LinuxTV_dvb-apps to get the latest tarball and roll your own. It is a trivial compile with no dependencies or config file to. Just run make then make install for instant gratification or build your own package. If you prefer, you can just run the executables strait from the build directory.
Note that some distros package dvb-apps as dvb-utils and that there is another bundle of dvb related utilities named DVBapps. If you have installed or built the correct dvb-apps, in addition to some include files, libraries and frequency listings you should have installed the follwing command line utilities
[code] rick[~]$ ls saves/build/usr/local/bin/ atsc_epg azap dib3000-watch dvbdate dvbscan femon gotox scan tzap av7110_loadkeys czap dst_test dvbnet dvbtraffic gnutv lsdvb szap zap [/code]
I will only discuss the use of scan and tzap in this tutorial.
In order to tune a channel with tzap or indeed other applications including mplayer and xine you will first need a channels.conf file. This is created using the scan, and a file containing initial tuning data for at least one transponder/channel for your area. Dvb-apps provides this data for the TV transponders in my area (on Mt. Dandenong) in the file /usr/local/share/dvb/dvb-t/au-Melbourne.