KaraivTV 0.5 review

KaraivTV is SuperKaramba theme designed for controlling a TV card controlled by an ivtv family (ivtvdriver.org) of drivers. The p

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 25K Developer: Suslik

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KaraivTV is SuperKaramba theme designed for controlling a TV card controlled by an ivtv family (ivtvdriver.org) of drivers.

The peculiar points of this family of cards are:
1. that they have a hardware MPEG2 encoder that outputs the video and audio as an MPEG2 compressed stream. This means that you can watch output of the card in ANY MPEG2 player. (or Kaffeine in my/this case)
2. ivTv drivers come with command line utilities - ivtvctl and ivtv-tune - that allow to set frequency(ivtvctl) and channel(ivtv-tune) from command line.

As a result, you can watch the video in one application, while controlling the channel from another. This applet IS that "another" application. (In other words, KaraivTV is a wrapper for ivtvctl and ivtv-tune commands.)

USAGE:

1. Run the applet (double-click the file you download from here, or double-click karaivtv.theme if you extracted the skz)
2. Go into config menu (right click) to choose the frequency storage engine. (see Setting Channel Frequencies bellow)
3. Enter the channel number in the middle section, press enter.
4. Click (double-click) the "power button" to start TV viewing in Kaffeine.
5. Kaffeine Tips
"U" key - mute
"M" key - removes menus/buttons > just video screen.

INSTALLATION:

1. Save the karaivtv-0.4.skz file you downloaded from here.
2. Double-click it.

SETTING CHANNEL FREQUENCIES

This applet relies on 2 methods of knowing the frequency for a channel.

- It can read the Channel - Frequency pairs from a file and feed the frequency to the ivtvctl directly, or
- It can rely on ivtv-tune util for choosing the frequency for a given channel. (ivtv-tune WILL need to know a broadcasting standard)

To switch between the two modes, look int the config menu (right-click on the applet) If you chose the "ivtv-tune", you will have to tell it what standard to use.

Why don't I just use the ivtv-util? For some (many?) regions ivtv-tune has broken / non-existent tables. (Example: us-cable-hrc is absent in ver. 0.7) So, I have to use the file with custom freqs.

Requirements:
SuperKaramba

What's New in This Release:
Made it possible to load the custom frequency files from the config menu. No need to unzip / tweak the code directly.
Made it possible to use ivtv-tune for switching channels. Assuming your region is listed in "ivtv-tune -L", you don't have to use the custom freq file any more.