Support TV - Proposal for F9 - enhanced DVB capabilities

David Timms dtimms at iinet.net.au
Sat Nov 24 08:14:58 UTC 2007


Otto Rey wrote:
> Fedora should have a good support of TV cards.

Some areas interesting to me:

1. auto detect / load of drivers:
I would be great if the bootup process would detect that the user has a 
dvb tuner card and load the driver(s) without intervention {even once}.

Currently I can # modprobe dvb_bt8xx   to get the kernel driver loaded.
This can be manually inserted into /etc/modprobe.conf , but with the 
hal/udev packages, I assume it is possible for the detection of the card 
on the pci bus during bootup to be the trigger to cause the module to be 
loaded.

If so, possibly what is needed is suitable pciid -> driver mapping for a 
wider range of multimedia / tv devices.

This would go a fair way in making it simpler for people to get dtv 
going on their machines. Although, a user would still need to find 
non-fedora packages for actual playback of dvb streams.

2. DVB tuning:
Another area where improvements can be made is in the initial setup / 
channel scan for DVB cards {maybe analog as well?}. Currently, it is a 
task to find appropriate info, then to run some carrier detecting 
program, and then have it detect the demodulation and decoding types, 
and lastly convert this to a useable list of available DVB channels.

There also seems to be no standard location for the generated 
channels.conf file, and hence needing to making multiple copies of it 
available for various DVB playback applications {xine, mplayer}, in user 
.app directories. Having a standard app build a channels.conf for the 
users location, and placing it in a standard location means that 
downstream users of the file {tzap, xine, mplayer can be modified to 
expect a channels.conf in that location, but still allow over-ride with 
appropriate parameters if required.

3. DVB recording packages:
AFAIK, a package that can record {not playback} a DVB stream would meet 
F guidelines. In fact it can be as simple as using tzap {dvb-apps} and 
cat to record dvb programs.

Perhaps a split-up mythtv package that can record analog and digital 
content, but optionally playback mpeg streams {live, recorded, delayed} 
only if non Fedora parts are installed would be possible. This could 
also help to support both analog capture cards and digital cards with 
built-in mpeg decoders out of the box in a great TV app.

I have no idea if that is possible, ie if there are compile options, 
etc. However, it can be installed as a backend only - where no playback 
occurs on the scheduled program recording machine, and a frontend 
machine connects to select times/programs for record.

Cheers,

David Timms.




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