The State Of DVB-S On Linux

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I just wasted a few hours experimenting with DVB applications for Linux as I thought I’d like an alternative to Kaffeine that I currently use.

Guess what? None of them worked despite tuning fine using w_scan, scan or their internal scanners.

Totem and gnome-dvb-control use gnome-dvb-daemon as their backend which just coredumps almost instantly, the frontends just spawn a load of python errors whenever you click something.

The CLI favourite “vdr” just kind of sits there doing nothing instead of displaying a menu.

xawtv is just a joke these days, tvtime is not much better.

Everything seems to be focused on DVB-T (Freeview) rather than DVB-S2 (Freesat/Sky).

So I’m sticking with Kaffeine to drive my WinTV Nova-HD-S2. It works well but I’d like a console interface and a better EPG.

4 thoughts on “The State Of DVB-S On Linux”

  2. wow, someone does read my blog lol!

    thanks for the comment, i don’t really want anything as heavy as xbmc just to do some simple recording, although i’ll probably put it on my revo3610 (as i’m getting fed up of plex on the mac mini) for a frontend.

    i just want a cli command so i can trigger a recording on the fileserver from my netbook or android phone or something, i’m not fussed about scheduling etc.

  3. >>The CLI favourite “vdr” just kind of sits there doing nothing instead of displaying a
    >>menu

    If it does, it’s *your* fault to
    - not read ‘fine manuals’ ot install guides.
    - not to ask in forums specialized to vdr if you’re running into probs
    - not to search in specialized VDR wikis (several langs like en, de, it, …)
    - think, that you are a geek on every topic.

    btw., it’s not command line interface (if thats what you meant with ‘CLI’). And it’s not focussed on DVB-T (strange assumption anyway..), it’s rather one of the apps supporting DVB-S2 on linux at first.