Any Suggestions for TV software, to use with my USB TV Receiver/Aerial?

[mightyd]

Any suggestions for TV software to use with my USB Freeview TV Receiver (Aerial)? Thanks

[Neil Edmond]

The claim is made that VLC can tune TV channels from a capture device. I have not yet got it working though. So I use either Kaffeine or Me TV. Between the two Kaffeine has better tools and, for me at least, Me TV utilizes graphics acceleration better. Though I still don't get smooth video with either.

Edit: Just today I decided to get VLC another try. Yay! I finally got it working...sort of. Appears my old computer is too slow to decode the video (sound works fine), it just freezes displaying a still picture. I have a 2-core 2.6GHz AMD CPU with nVidia graphics VDPAU enabled, but the error output is: [0x7f72f40a24e8] avcodec decoder error: more than 5 seconds of late video -> dropping frame (computer too slow ?)

[rene]

I have at this point transferred my USB TV receiver to a Windows system even if only since I wasn't using it anyway but when I did found installing tvheadend, https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheaden ... Repository, the in the end best solution. Especially if you will be using a media-center type viewer such as Kodi, but really even if your wants are simpler than that, due to the unfortunately rather sad state of TV applications on Linux.

But yes, VLC can be used directly. You do something like

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt-get install w-scan
$ w_scan -ft -c DE -L >channels.xspf
$ vlc channels.xspf

or open the channels.xspf file in VLC itself with "Open File", Ctrl+O. Clearly substitute the applicable value of "DE" when generating it.

Using VLC as a viewer is also possible with Tvheadend. I at the time still used the VLC HTSP plugin as available from https://github.com/BtbN/vlc-htsp-plugin to have it communicate with Tvheadend but as that page mentions, that plugin's rather dead. As it however also mentions, you can simply in Tvheadend export the channel list as an m3u playlist and give that to VLC.

If you will be looking at Tvheadend: configuring it can feel like a bit off a chore at firs but once you're over the initial (jargon) hump it's in fact pretty minimal. It's best to google up country/provider-specific configuration advise, but generic documentation is here: https://docs.tvheadend.org/configure_tvheadend/

[Neil Edmond]

Hey rene, want to thank you for reminding me about Tvheadend. I discovered that I had installed it some time ago, but never got around to configuring. Well, today I configured Tvheadend, and must say, you got it right. Tvheadend is a much better solution not only on my desktop PC, but I also configured my Kodi box in the media room and now enjoy streaming HDTV there. On the desktop, VLC still struggles with the stream, but Gnome Mplayer plays TV even better (on my system) than does VLC, Kaffeine or Me TV. You've motivated me to discover my ideal solution! Thanks again!

[rene]

Now all we have to hope for is not having scared away self-professed Linux Newbie mightyd with the client/server-type setup...

[mightyd]

Hey, thanks for all the advice. Being a newbie, I didn't quite understand everything you said haha, but i am going to start off trying Kaffeine, Me TV, VLC. And then reread everything you wrote, a few times Thanks