The VideoLAN Forums

I have Ubuntu 7.04 with the mercurial dvb/v4l drivers and the mercurial dvb tools installed. I can watch analog/digital cable tv just fine with xine and mplayer using a channels.conf. I can not figure out how to use vlc for tv watching. I use the pcHDTV HD-3000 ATSC/QAM-256 tuner here in the U.S. Looking at the dvb and video4linux tabs I am just confused. Here's a snippet of my channels.conf data.

EWTN:459000000:QAM_256:2048:2049:1
C-SPAN2:459000000:QAM_256:2112:2113:2
DISCOVERY:459000000:QAM_256:2176:2177:3
ALTITUDE:459000000:QAM_256:2240:2241:12
MSNBC:459000000:QAM_256:2304:2305:10
TVLAND:459000000:QAM_256:2368:2369:11

First you need a version of vlc compiled with "--enable-dvb" (when doing ./configure .... before compilation) and this option is not enabled by default.

Then you start vlc directly using your channels.conf file, simply do: (of course when being in a folder where you have a copy of this file)
This should start the first channel in the channels.conf file. Afterwards you can open the playlist window of vlc and save this configuration on a regular playlist file, for example as: "cable_tv.m3u" and in this file you will see the options that vlc needs to use your cable-tv card.

If you want to start vlc in a more manual way you can for example do something like:

vlc --program 1 --color --ttl 12 dvb:// --dvb-frequency=459000000 --dvb-adapter=0

here the number behind --program is the last number in the lines of channels.conf and the frequency is the first number behind the name. At least this is the case with me and with dvb-t (instead of dvb-c as with you but it should be similar). In any case these informations are in the playlist file you can create using channels.conf as described above.

Afterwards you can create scripts to record a dvb channel on a file etc.

Thank you very much. I did not realize that vlc does not include dvb by default. The manual way is excellent too. Right now I am just using the default Ubuntu vlc. I will have to look into compiling vlc.

The "not-including of dvb by default" applies if you compile yourself with ./configure ...
If you use the Ubunto binary there are good chances that they included the dvb support when compiling vlc (I know for example that the Mandriva-binaries of vlc contain dvb-support). You can test that with: which should give something like: or more generally: which should give you a very long list of dvb-options. If this list is empty (or very short with a few non-relevant options containing only the word "dvb") then you don't have dvb support.

When you want to comile vlc with dvb support on your own, you need the dvb kernel-header files which should be installed in:

/usr/include/linux/dvb/

If you don't have this folder on your system you may copy it to this place from a (relatively) recent kernel-source tree:
<kernel_source_tree>/include/linux/dvb/
or from the mercury-driver tree:
v4l-dvb/linux/include/linux/dvb/
either or of these two will work fine and if the kernel or mercury-driver has less than a year there will no problem in compiling vlc with these headers. Maybe your system already contains "/usr/include/linux/dvb/".

Furthermore it is NOT necessary that your kernel-driver of your dvb-card is compiled with the same version of the headers, i.e. if you change later the kernel or dvb-driver (therefore with new headers) you don't need to reinstall the dvb-headers for vlc in /usr/include/linux/dvb/ neither to recompile vlc only for this.

If the headers are absent "./configure --enable-dvb ..." will complain with an error message.

I just tested the Ubuntu vlc version and it does come with dvb built-in. So I think I will skip the compiling vlc but I will keep your compiling information bookmarked. Thanks again.

And does it work with your dvb-card ? I mean with simply "vlc channels.conf" ?

And does it work with your dvb-card ? I mean with simply "vlc channels.conf" ?

It works really great with the channels.conf. I used vlc channels.conf and then saved it as a playlist. I never had a reason before to use the playlist and I got to say it's pretty cool seeing the names of channels in there. Right now I just open up the playlist then click on the channel I want.

I use the DVB-T card, it works perfectly on Window XP , but can't on ubuntu 7.04
i use the command
% vlc channels.conf
the playlist displays all channel i need, bur i can't play any of them. the system notes that:
[00002557] main input error: no suitable access module for `dvb:'
[00002562] dvb access error: FrontEndOpen: opening device failed (No such file or directory)
[00002560] main input error: no suitable access module for `dvb:'
[00002565] dvb access error: FrontEndOpen: opening device failed (No such file or directory)
[00002563] main input error: no suitable access module for `dvb:'
[00002568] dvb access error: FrontEndOpen: opening device failed (No such file or directory)
[00002566] main input error: no suitable access module for `dvb:'
[00002571] dvb access error: FrontEndOpen: opening device failed (No such file or directory)
i don't known why, please help me