tveasy

tveasy uses 'mplayer' the wonderful video viewing application on linux to let you view tv at the best possible quality. it offers you two options, normal play (CPU friendly, no quality improvement), or deferred play which gives you the best quality. The scripts and everything that comes with the package are licensed under the GPL.

tveasy was written as most of the TV viewing applications on Linux relied on hard-coded frequency lists (except tvtime which still had a bug that made the all out channel scan in version 0.99 not function.) Most Cable Analog Television (CATV) operators in India seem to use non-standard frequency bands for channels constantly swapping their muxers across them. Existing TV viewing applications with good features (MythTV, tvtime and XawTV) in that order (of quality) do not address this issue. Instead of solving each of them by bug-posts and fixes I decided to write one application that can

• scan all analog tv frequencies for available channels.
• allow the user to name and group channels as desired.
• export the frequency lists and channel names to the three programs listed.
• provide a simple interface to view and record programs on CATV (currently using mplayer for tv viewing, transcoding).

"tveasy" intends to be a prototype for a highly configurable tv viewing application. It wants to fill in the space between tvtime, Xawtv and MythTV whose UIs restrict the amount of configuration a user can do.

"tveasy" can record both with MPEG and AVI headers, however I hard-coded the choice of MPEG4 (sometimes inaccurately referred to as DIVX) as the used video format. If you are new to getting a "TV Tuner Card" setup in linux, please visit BTTV gallery, a wonderful site maintained by Gunther Mayer. It shows you the cards, points you out to the right resources and kernel parameters to get them going. Distributions like SuSE do make your job a lot easier, but considering the disparity in usage of standard reference implementation boards (from Philips SAA713x chips and Conexant C8xx /originally BTTV 8xx/ chips) it usually never works out of the box. Feel free to send me a mail if you need help.

Downloads

There are two versions of tveasy here. tveasy-0.0.1.tar.zip [BETA] and tveasy-0.0.2.tar.zip [ALPHA]. The first version is less buggy but uses more of mplayer's filters to hog CPU. The second version has more features, uses less CPU but may have a few bugs. The channel scanner used here (named 'scantv') is borrowed from XawTV primarily because tvtime's scanner seemed to catch channel shadows (on noisy lines.)

After a lull in any further development here is tveasy-0.0.3.tar.bz2 [STABLE]. This version is least buggy, has several issues sorted out. It's still not for out-of-the-box usage and may require some extra hand-coding.

Unpacking

1. $ unzip tveasy-0.0.?.tar.zip

2. from the relevant directory you want to install:

$ tar xvf [path-to-tveasy]/tveasy-*.tar

3. Now read README, INSTALL in that order.

Issues

• Audio/Video synch (solved for the most part), but crops up on different machines.
• Audio quality on mono-audio output is a bit noisy, not enough "real"time to apply filters here.
• External dependency on libzvbi. For specific dependencies, please read the README file.
• Full documentation is yet to be written. I now presume that the user has some idea of using Mplayer or can invoke man mplayer to find out which keys to use.
• Tveasy assumes most linux installations have "dialog" installed. It still does not have an "rpm" like easy install package.
• I still have no publicly accessible bugzilla if people are to start using it seriously, so initial bug submissions will have to be by e-mail.
• Don't try "tveasy-0.0.2" if you aren't prepared for surprises and want to do some script debugging yourself.
• The most scary part: tveasy took 5 days to write and test! .. and version 0.0.2 is not completely tested for bugs.

Distributing

You're welcome to get more friends with tv-tuner cards try this out. You can either point them out to this tveasy link or try out "make distrib" from your installation and give it to your friends.

Bugs, Comments

As I've already pointed out the lack of a Bugzilla to address issues for the present, please send me email to sort out any bugs for now. If you'd like to join in for development, do shoot me a mail and we'll fix up sourceforge or another website hosted with gforge to get it public and easier for us to work remotely.

Screenshots of tveasy-0.0.1

channel naming
group choosing
tveasy's player

Screenshots of mplayer invoked by tveasy-0.0.1

HBO without noise filtering

HBO with noise filtering

BBC without noise filtering

BBC with noise filtering