DVB Cards Usage

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Introduction

GeeXboX has a support for various types of DVB cards (Terrestrial, Cable, ATSC and Satellite) either in PCI or USB. Please note that for now, only one DVB adapter is usable at a time.

Some DVB devices (especially USB ones) may require an external proprietary firmware to be loaded in the mean time as the driver to be usable. You may have a look at the LinuxTV DVB Wiki to see if your card requires one or not and if so, which one it is.

Some firmwares can be fetched directly from the LinuxTV website, otherwise may be included in the Windows drivers . See the GeeXboX firmware loader documentation to see how to get them loaded for you.

For each card, the list of channels is available through the MPlayer's open menu. Nevertheless, there's no way to auto-discover these channels.

Scanning DVB channels

Thus, adding the list of DVB channels to GeeXboX can be done in several ways :

  • - using an existing channel list : MPlayer needs to have a working channels.conf file to use DVB. This file can be generated through the utilities provided by the dvb-apps package. Simply use a Linux box that has a DVB card configured, download the linuxtv-dvb-apps tarball, compile it and create the config file using the scan executable, in zap format (which is the default as of dvb-apps 1.1.0). For example, for a DVB-S (Satellite) card using Astra-19.2E as the provider : 
wget http://www.linuxtv.org/download/dvb/linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.0.tar.bz2
tar jxvf linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.0.tar.bz2
cd linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.0/util/scan
make
./scan -x 0 dvb-s/Astra-19.2E > channels.conf

The -x 0 flag is here to restrict the scan to Free To Air channels only. Please always do so, as MPlayer do not support encrypted DVB channels.

According to your type of DVB card, choose either a file from the dvb-s, dvb-c, dvb-t or atsc directories and ask for a scan.

Then, simply copy the channels.conf file you've just created to the /etc/mplayer directory in the GeeXboX generator tree, and rebuild away.

  • - using an existing transponder list : the procedure is highly similar to the one defined just before but with no scan. This time, the scan will be done at GeeXboX boot but this way, you do no more require another Linux system to generate the channels.conf file.

To do so, you simpy have to check at the LinuxTV CVS .

According to your DVB card type (S/T/C/ATSC), check for the good directory and grab the transponder frequency list that fit your needs. Then simply rename the file to dvb.conf and copy it to /etc. Then, rebuild a new ISO using the generator.

At bootup, if GeeXboX detects a valid transponder file in /etc/dvb.conf, it will be used to scan for DVB channels and will generate the /etc/mplayer/channels.conf file by itself.

WARNING : Scanning can be slow according to the number of devices to be scanned and will be done each time you boot GeeXboX if using it as a LiveCD. It is highly recommended that you do it once only, then copy the generated /etc/mplayer/channels.conf file somewhere else and rebuild an ISO using generator, following the first method or to install it on disk.

  • - using installator : this is for sure the easiest solution but requires you to install GeeXboX to disk. During the installation process, if a valid DVB device is recognized by the system, the installator script will ask you if you want to scan for DVB channels.

The installator contains the complete list of transponders frequencies. That way, you just have to select your DVB device type and the transponder file you want to use for GeeXboX to scan. The channels.conf file will then be automatically generated.

Retrieved from "http://www.geexbox.org/wiki/index.php/DVB_Cards_Usage"
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