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A satellite TV alternative for Linux or
how to watch TV on Linux
Do you think that all (or most) the computer TV cards are made for other operating systems ? Please re-think ! Today a satellite TV alternative for Linux exists. Even if the hardware makers do ignore us and avoid to mention us on their packages, we are able to watch TV on Linux.
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 Click image to zoom |
Reception of TGN - Thai Global Network - with a Nova-s plus TV card on a Linux box
To watch the "free to air" digital satellite TV channels transmitted by the Astra and Hotbird satellites in Western Europe, we are using a TV card "Hauppauge Nova-S plus" in a PC running Linux Ubuntu version 7.04 Feisty Fawn.
The TV card "Hauppauge Nova-S plus" has many other satellites in its list which cannot be received in Western Europe. Thus I admit that this TV card should also be useful and operable in other parts of the world.
Infos and recommendations to install software and get the TV card to work can be found on the internet, but the info is scattered at many different places. Some infos are easier to find than others. So I tried to group together all the info that was useful and also some of the recommendations which did look less useful, but might be important too.
Kaffeine
We will be using the program "Kaffeine" to watch TV.Gnome or KDE
Kaffeine is a KDE program and Ubuntu does run Gnome, but that is not a problem. When you install Kaffeine or any other KDE program in Ubuntu-Gnome with Synaptic, it will also install the libraries needed to run KDE programs. If you prefer running KDE rather than Gnome, you can install Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. Indeed you can run KDE programs if you are using Gnome and vice-versa, you can run Gnome programs if you are using KDE.Why "Kaffeine" ? Because many people do recommend it and I got the impression that it is the only one which will let you run a scan of the channels of the satellites. Indeed I did try a few other programs and could not yet get one of them to scan the satellite channels or to let me watch any satellite channel.
TV card driver
To watch TV with Kaffeine, you must click on the 6th button in Kaffeine after launching Kaffeine.
The start screen of Kaffeine with 6 buttons
Click image to zoom
When I did launch Kaffeine for the first time, it had only 5 buttons. It did turn out that every time after booting the PC, I must type in a console window :
sudo modprobe cx88-dvb
. Modprobe is a program to add modules to the Linux Kernel. The name of the module you may need to add is dependent on the TV card, so if you are using a different TV card you will need to type something different.Making modprobe automatic
To avoid the annoying task to typesudo modprobe cx88-dvb
every day, you can tell the PC to do it for you automatically this way : Open the file /etc/rc.local as root and type into the last but one line sudo modprobe cx88-dvb
(just before the line with exit 0).To edit the file as root, open a console (or terminal), then type gksudo gedit (ubuntu) or kdesu kwrite (kubuntu)
Scanning the satellite channels
Before scanning the satellite channels, you must tell Kaffeine how much satellites and which satellites you want to receive. Go to DVB/DVB Settings in Kaffeine like shown below and select the number and names of the satellites.
Selecting the satellites to receive
Click image to zoom
Then go to DVB/Channels or just type a
C
(in the main window of Kaffeine, with no open dialog box). Select one of the satellites you are able to receive, possibly select the check-box for free-to-air channels and click on scan.Scan not perfect
The scan of the channels did only work well for Astra but not for Hotbird. It did found 170 "free to air" channels for Astra and only very few for Hotbird, may be 12 or so. Indeed there are much more of them and we did enter those that we want to watch, by hand.There is an up to date table of the Hotbird channels at :
http://www.satscan.net/transponders.php?SatelliteID=4
There is an up to date table of the Astra channels at :
http://www.satscan.net/transponders.php?SatelliteID=1
xine driver = xshm
At this stage we could receive many Astra channels, but we could only hear the sound. The image was a rectangle with sloppy lines, just like a TV set which is missing the line synchro signal. We did follow many recommendations gathered all over the internet. Most of them did not help, however some of them may still be steps that are useful or necessary even if they did not solve the mentioned problem. So I will detail them below.The important step that brought us a good image was to go to Settings/xine Engine Parameters/video/driver (in Kaffeine) and to choose xshm instead of auto.
Setting the xine engine parameters in Kaffeine
Click image to zoom
To quickly switch between TV in a Kaffeine window on the Ubuntu Desktop and a full screen TV image, just use CTRL-SHIFT-F.
Questionable installations
As said above, when researching why the image was bad, I found a lot of recommendations to do this and do that. These actions did not resolve the bad image problem, but some of them could be necessary nevertheless. To know it precisely, we would need to uninstall them one by one and check the impact. This would tell us exactly what is really necessary and what is not.These are the questionable actions :
Kaffeine/Settings/xine engine parameters/decoder/external.win32_codecs_path was set to a path which does not exist. Indeed the codecs files xineplug_decode_*.so, are stored at /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.4 . So I changed the setting to that path.
Then I did install following packages with Synaptic
- libxine-extracodecs
- libxine-main1
- xine-ui
- xviewg
- gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
which is probably unnecessary since these are codecs for gstreamer based players such as Rhythmbox, Totem, Banshee. Kaffeine is xine based, not gstreamer based.
We do keep gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, not for watching TV with Kaffeine since it is not necessary for that, but we keep it because it is probably useful to watch some video files with Totem.
Teletext or Videotext
A question which is not yet resolved is how to watch Teletext (some call it Videotext). Many channels on Astra and Hotbird do have Teletext encoded into their signal. AleVT seems to be a program that is specialized for Teletext. But I could not yet get it to show up some actual text pages, since I do not know how to tell Alevt which Astra (or Hotbird) channel I want it to decode. In other words I do not know how to link the Alevt software to the signal coming from the Hauppauge card.If I do find it out, I will tell you. However if you know it, you are welcome to contact me with your information.
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