betasam's Journal: Cable Analog Television in India

During the recent week, I have been spending time, getting my TV Tuner card installed on my favorite Linux desktop. Installing has been a rough ride of sorts - requiring me to guess tuner chipsets and wiring GPIOs. Fortunately BTTV Gallery hosted by Gunther Mayer had the necessary information to help me out.

Then came the task of watching and recording Television. I found three applications suitable to my needs, MythTV, tvtime and XawTV. Each come with specific features that are useful. The first two offer postprocessing, recording and Alpha blended OSDs. All three of them provide support for remote controls.

Despite the availability of these applications, I found that the use of non-standard frequency bands by the CATV operator made it difficult to scan for channels. Existing channel scanners from tvtime (tvtime-scanner) and Xawtv (scantv) supported scanning of the entire frequency range, however due to unresolved bugs did not render the scanned output useful. CATV operators multiplex digitally decoded channels into frequency bands convenient for transmission. However this differs from operator to operator and town to town making a simple patch of my favorite tv viewing applications infeasible at present. (I would require to modify them to read xml frequency tables, though tvtime does support this, there are bugs.)

This led me to try and write my own set of scripts to use "mplayer" as my tv player (having used it extensively for video playing prior) and a modified version of "scantv" for scanning frequencies. This took me at least 5 days, and now is available on public domain as tveasy. I must say, that this would not have been possible, without Open Source products, for I ripped off pieces of scantv for my own usage with ease. Having benefited so from "Free Software", I obviously had to give something back, and hence wrote a set of scripts for the same. I love "Free" Software.