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.