[mythtvnz] Getting DVB-T working under Linux

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Simon Cantem <scantem at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I recently bought an Asus u3100 USB DVB-T tuner stick and I've been having a
> bit of trouble getting it running under Linux. I believe I have a fully
> functioning channels.conf file for Christchurch (I used w_scan to build it),
> and have come up against the following:
>
> * I'm running ubuntu 8.10, everything's up to date
> * The kernel finds it OK, it shows up in dmesg and an adapter is created in
> /dev/dvb
> * It works under xine - sort of. I can get TV3 to work with both video and
> audio, but with the rest of the channels I only get video (I noticed TV3
> uses a different audio codec).
> * I can't get it to work under mplayer (my player of choice), it seems to
> find it OK but I don't get any video or audio for any channels, and the
> window which usually pops up in X to display the video doesn't even appear.
> I get the following in the console:
>
> Playing dvb://TV3.
> dvb_tune Freq: 698000000
> TS file format detected.
> VIDEO MPEG2(pid=450) AUDIO MPA(pid=400) NO SUBS (yet)!  PROGRAM N. 0
>
> * If I do a dumpstream in mplayer or cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 to a ts file
> I can't play it in mplayer, I get "codec 0x50 not found" or if I turn off
> the audio "video stream not found"
> * I've tried both mplayer 1.0rc2 in the main ubuntu repo and the latest
> version out of subversion, both without success
> * If I use Kaffeine it only finds TV3, but it plays that with both video and
> sound
>
> Does anyone have any ideas on what I can try next, reading through the
> mailing list here and on the mplayer mailing list I can't find anyone who's
> come up against this before (which makes me think I'm missing something
> really simple or it's a very difficult problem!)

you can try:

1. making sure you have your player as a very recent version with
support for both ethe video and audio codecs used

2. make sure your cpu is powerful enough to handle decoding the video
codec used (hint 3G or higher core2duo or similar is likely needed)

3. join mythtv-nz mailing list where there is a lot of knowledge, for
mplayer as well as mythtv.