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.

Click image to zoom

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 0.8

We will be using the program "Kaffeine" to watch TV.



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.


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 : . 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.

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.



Then go to DVB/Channels or just type a (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.

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.


To quickly switch between TV in a Kaffeine window on the Ubuntu Desktop and a full screen TV image, just use CTRL-SHIFT-F.

Kaffeine 1.0

Update for Kaffeine 1.0 (May 2011):
Kaffeine 1.0 did work "out of the box" with the "Hauppauge Nova-S plus" card mentioned above, on a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. None of the follow up installations described above were necessary. But those who got used to Kaffeine 0.8 will observe that many functions are a little bit different in Kaffeine 1.0. Most settings that were available in Kaffeine 0.8 are gone.

If you record some videos and wish that a double click on a record (in Nautilus) launches Kaffeine, you will have to define Kaffeine as the default application for m2t files. This is done through a right click on an m2t file in Nautilus, then and the tab . Else, a double click on an m2t file in Nautilus would launch the Movie Player (Totem).

There is a strange behaviour we did observe with our Kaffeine 1.0 /Ubuntu 10.04 installation:
If, after launching Kaffeine, you select a channel with the remote control, zapping is working ok.
If, after launching Kaffeine, you select a channel from the list on the screen with the mouse, trying to zap with the remote control afterwards does NOT work.
To get the remote control to work again:

• Either quit Kaffeine and re-launch it
• Or go to the playlist tab or some other tab, then come back to the TV tab

There is one big change in Kaffeine 1.0 that did really annoy us. The channels are not stored in a flat file (.kde/share/apps/kaffeine/channels.dvb , like it was the case with Kaffeine 0.8) but in a database file (~/.kde/share/apps/kaffeine/sqlite.db).

Why is the channels database annoying ?

The channels of Astra and Hotbird are changing rather often. This induces that you will have to re-scan the channels rather often. After each scan the numbers of the channels will be different and your preferred channels might have high numbers in the hundreds or thousands. Not quite practical for zapping. For your comfort it would be desirable to have the numbers 1 to 10 always attributed to the same 10 most viewed channels and in the same order. We did write a perl script that re-assigns the numbers 1 to 50 according to our preferences (in the flat channel file). After a new channel scan, we did just run our perl script and Voilà.

Of course this perl script doesn't work with the new database file. Re-assigning the numbers in the new database file can be done manually with the (synaptic : sqlitebrowser). But it is a terribly time wasting task. Writing a script that would automate that task might be possible, but I am currently missing the necessary background knowledge to do it.

Moreover, I must add that I do not like databases. I am convinced that most applications that are using databases could be conceived with flat files. Only when several users want to write into the data pool at the same time, is a database really necessary. In most if not all cases where there is one maintainer who writes into the data pool and several users who only read from the data pool, a flat data file would be better.

Teletext or Videotext

Update, May 2011:
Many channels on Astra and Hotbird do have Teletext (some call it Videotext) encoded into their signal. AleVT is a program that is specialized for Teletext (available in synaptic). But if you do just launch Alevt, you will be puzzled. It doesn't seem to do what you are expecting.

To navigate through the teletext of a given channel:

First launch Kaffeine and select the desired channel.
Then open a console and type:
Remark: The part adapter0 and demux0 might need to be adapted if your hardware is different.

Now you can call a teletext page by typing its number with the remote control, or by clicking on a page number on the screen with the mouse.