Club Linux Coffs Harbour

I didn't know it until about a month ago, but there's this thing called DVB-T, a standard for digital video broadcasts (the "DVB" bit) by terrestrial broadcasters (the "T" bit). You can get really cheap little USB devices to receive and decode these broadcasts, and Gary brought one of them in to the meeting before last.

The good news is that in Ubuntu these things are supported out of the box. You plug it in, and there's suddenly a new item in Totem's (sorry, "Movie Player's") File menu to start watching TV.The trouble is that Totem doesn't have a mechanism for scanning for available channels, so you need to provide this information yourself. Totem recommends using a separate program called w_scan to generate the channel configuration file it needs, but unfortunately this particular device wasn't supported by w_scan.

The solution we finally found was to use another package called dvb-utils, which has a channel scanner called - wait for it - 'scan' (where do they come up with these names?). I can't pretend to understand how it works, but apparently you have to feed it a certain amount of information to point it in the correct general direction, and fortunately the dvb-utils package comes with files with this information for over 500 regions of the world, including the Mid North Coast of NSW. So all you have to do is open a terminal and enter:

scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t/au-MidNorthCoast > ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf

(GStreamer is the underlying multimedia freamework that powers Totem, Rhythmbox, and a host of other applications.) 

On the first attempt, we found Prime. On the second, we lost that, but picked up SBS (an improvement in anybody's book). We then moved the stubby little aerial included with the device onto the window sill, and picked up every terrestrial TV station, and a couple of radio stations. Here's the file, which you just have to pop into the .gstreamer subdirectory of your home directory. Apparently this information may change every so often, so it's probably best to do your own scan, but we can say that this is accurate for at least anybody in the environs of the Park Beach Bowling Club as at 31/8/08.

And the result? We picked up the broadcasts, at a blistering four or five frames per minute and no sound, but it was surmised that this had more to do with the little aerial and being in regional Australia than the hardware or software. Gary will be trying it out via the coaxial cable that comes from his roof, and will hopefully have something more positive to report.