dvbd 0.7.7 review

The idea behind dvbd is to make maximum use of your DVB card by allowing multiple channels on the same frequency to be tuned

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: John Knottenbelt

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The idea behind dvbd is to make maximum use of your DVB card by allowing multiple channels on the same frequency to be tuned. It is split into a daemon (dvbd) and client programs (dvbcat, dvbsched, dvblist). It is possible to associate a priority with a connection to the daemon, so that (depending on the given priority) the tuner can be made available by dropping connections of inferior priority.

A web frontend to dvbsched, called dvbdguide, is included to facilitate the scheduling of dvbd recording activities. Please note this requires an XMLTV datafeed. Check out a captured dvbdguide page.

The daemon has a configuration file which by default is /etc/dvbd/config. The format of the file is lines of key=value. Line comments can be begun with #.

The following configuration options are available:

socket
the (unix) socket to listen on. Default is /var/run/dvbd/dvbd.socket
pid
the pid file to write to once it has become a daemon. Default is /var/run/dvbd/dvbd.pid
log
the log file to write to. Default is /var/log/dvbd.log
schedule
the schedule file to write to. Default is /var/spool/dvbd/schedule
debug
the debug level (default is 0) If a higher debug level is set, dvbd will not go into the background.
numcards
the number of DVB cards your system supports
card0
the first DVB card. The format of this field is type:frontend:channels Where

type may be one of dvb-t, dvb-s or dvb-t.
frontend is the path to the frontend (tuner) for the card
channels is the path to the tzap/szap/czap format channels.conf file for the card.

If no cards are specified, a default of one dvb-t card is assumed with channels file /etc/tzap.channels.conf and frontend /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0

At the moment there are three client programs. dvbcat, dvblist and dvbsched. dvbcat can be used to extract a stream from the dvbd for live TV.

For example:

$ dvbcat dvb-t "BBC ONE" | mplayer -

dvbsched is used to schedule a recording. Note that an output file must be specified whose containing directory must be owned by the user issuing the request. The directory must also be writable by the dvbd program.

The time format is in at(1) format. See at's manpage for more information about it.

For example:

mkdir /tmp/recordings
dvbsched dvb-t "ITV 2" 19.20 32 /tmp/recordings/itv2.mpg

If there is a clash the program will ask you if you want to cancel your job.

dvblist shows the channels available to tune at the given priority (default is 10).

For example:

dvblist dvb-t

If there are some existing connections the list of channels may be shorter than the full list.