Watching DVB-T television on my Ubuntu

As mentioned in the edit of my previous post, I got my DVB-T stick working without any big problems. Nevertheless here are the steps I took to get it fully working! The DVB-T stick is a Pinacle 72e dvb-t tuner usb stick.

1. Use Kaffeine in the beginning. It is the simplest DVB-T player. Scan for channels and play, that’s it.

2. Then I followed this guide to get MythTV working. MythTV is a more advanced mediaplayer than Kaffeine. It is especially good in working with TV capture cards and everything related (timeshifting, recording, pausing, …). It can even work with several capture cards. The disadvantage is that the configuration is a bit counterintuitive.. (but with the guide in your hands you’ll be safe)

3. I got a problem with my audio-jack, when I plugged in my speakers or a headphone, nothing happened. I used these steps to solve the problem.

4. You can select MythTV to run on a second display in the setup (select screen “1″ instead of screen “0″).

5. My EPG (program guide) took the longest time to setup. The best way to go depends on the country in which you live. I live in Belgium and found the following approach to work well:

177  sudo apt-get install libc6-i386

178  sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

179  mkdir ~/mc2xml

180  cd /home/karel/mc2xml/

181  wget http://mc2xml.110mb.com/?h=o9wxhzm

182  ls

183  rm index.html\?h\=o9wxhzm

184  ls

185  chmod 755 mc2xml

186  sudo ./mc2xml -c us -g 10000

187  sudo ./mc2xml -c be -g 9000 -o xmltv.xml

188  ls

189  cat xmltv.xml

190  sudo ./mc2xml -c be -g 9000 -o xmltv.xml

191  sh myth_script.sh

192  ls

193  sudo sh myth_script.sh

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386

sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

mkdir ~/mc2xml

cd /home/karel/mc2xml/

–> download mc2xml from http://mc2xml.110mb.com/ and save it in the created folder

chmod 755 mc2xml

sudo ./mc2xml -c be -g 9000 -o xmltv.xml

Then I used the script from this site to convert the channel names to something more readable and fill the MythTV database. My replacements file looks like this:

I203250.750821.microsoft.com/een

I217250.750822.microsoft.com/ketnet-canvas

Make sure you change the “xml tv channel id” in MythTV backend channel editor to the same one you selected in the replacements file (e.g., “een” or “ketnet-canvas”). Now everything should work and MythTV should show the program guide:

Note that MythTV even shows the channel icons, which I find really cool (even MediaCenter couldn’t do that).

Switched to Ubuntu!

My laptop was getting on my nerves again, acting slow and dodgy (even though I formatted it only a few months ago). I was feeling adventurous and decided to kick my Windows out of the hard drive and install Linux on it! Asking my friend Bert what is the best Linux distribution in his opinion, I was pointed at Ubuntu. So Ubuntu it is

Not a day after deciding to clean up the computer I am happily using my Ubuntu. And the cool part is I can just keep using my favourite applications:

• Pidgin chat client is included in Ubuntu by default
• Virtualbox has a linux version. This will also allow me to run Windows in case I get homesick
• Dropbox for sharing my files between work and home
• Xmind for creating mind maps and notes
• Google Chrome (although it is not already stable, f.i. the security features don’t work yet)
• Evernote (using Wine, a Linux app that allows you to install and run Windows applications)

I’m a bit afraid of my more exotic hardware (dvb-t stick, PIC development board, …) but haven’t tried it yet.. But very positive so far!

edit: I got my DVB-T stick working without problems . It’s a Pinacle 72e stick, and it is natively supported by Ubuntu. I used Kaffeine player to first test it and it found all my channels without problems. Than I got things working in MythTV using this guide.

Two of the best free applications out there

This post gives some pointers to free applications that I’m a fan of. The first one is Launchy, which lets you launch an application with a minimum of keystrokes and without using a mouse. The other one is Evernote, which is a really nice program to organise your notes.