TealPlay is capable of using a DVB Tuner on Linux systems only. At the moment, this tuner
has only been tested with US ATSC TV and is known to be prone to crashing on weak and/or
unreliable signals. Use of the tuner currently depends on the dvbv5-zap command,
which must be installed and on the PATH.
Preparing to use the DVB Tuner with TealPlay is currently a rather tedious multistep
process that involves the command line. First, channels need to be identified using the
dvbv5-scan tool. The channel file produced by this tool then needs to be
converted to a set of playable INI files, which will likely require editing to create
meaningful library descriptions.
A TV tuner card compatible with the Linux DVB specification is required. See the hardware category listing on the LinuxTVWiki for supported device information.
In order to complete this process, you must be running a Linux system that has the
dvbv5-scan
and dvbv5-zap
commands installed and available on the PATH. These commands are part of the
dvb tools within v4l-utils,
which is hopefully available through your system package manager. On Alpine Linux, these
commands are available via the v4l-utils-dvbv5 package.
The dvbv5-scan command requires an initial scan table on which to
operate. Scan tables may be downloaded from the LinuxTV
dtv-scan-tables git
repository. So far, TealPlay has only been tested with ATSC signals, which were scanned
using the atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB file from this repository.
Run the dvbv5-scan command as follows:
dvbv5-scan -o dvb_channel.conf us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB
A list of command-line options for this command may be found by running
dvbv5-scan --help if you need to adapt the scan process to your own unique
system. Note that you must use the DVBV5 output format!
Once you have a dvb_channel.conf file, use TealPlay's built-in command-line
conversion tool to generate a set of playable INI files. First, create a directory to act
as a container for these files. Then, run:
tealplay --convert-dvb-to-ini dvb_channel.conf /path/to/output/directory
If all goes well, you will see a count of the number of channels converted. Open the TealPlay Settings window and add the directory you created to your library. You should see the channels become available once the scanning process finishes.
For library display purposes, you will probably want to edit the INI files. You may also want to make a container.ini file with a descriptive name for the TV channels as a group. Information about individual TV channels can be found from sources like Wikipedia, from which the text for the following example was taken:
Editing each of the INI files is the most tedious part of the TV setup step. Fortunately, TV stations do not change too rapidly in any given market area.
dvbv5-zap command code with direct use of the Linux device file to try
to rectify this issue.