[dundee] Digital TV in Linux

[Gordon Dunlop]

Hi All,
I decided to get a Freecom USB Digital TV stick for use on my computer 
so I could
watch football, to stop my wife moaning about me watching it on our TV 
as she dislikes
the sport.
My default operating system is Fedora Core 6 so I looked up the Linux 
forums to find that digital TV can be viewed using Myth TV and Kaffeine 
media player. Whilst awaiting the arrival of the stick, I setup Myth TV 
using  repositories  of a Red Hat enthusiast, it avoids
dependency errors doing a Yum  install of the MythTV-suite. I spent two 
hours doing the configurations and seting up the MySQL database, my 
Kaffeine media player had all the Xine libraries and multimedia codecs 
installed in the system. I downloaded the firmware for the USB
stick from theses Red Hat repositories, normally you can download the 
firmware from
linuxtv.org. The firmware was copied into /lib/firmware and when my USB 
stick was inserted
it is automatically picked up by the Linux kernel, using the dmesg 
command will confirm this.
I decided to use an extension from my main  house aerial as the piddly 
aerial provided will
not work, it all depends on your geographical location.
I decided to fire up Kaffeine first, the stick was already detected, 
scanned for the channels,
lo and behold I was watching perfect freeview television within 5 
minutes with live and timed
recording facilities. I was gobsmacked, like getting digital TV out of 
the box. I also tried it on
my Windows Partition, some members of my family use this partition for 
work use, and I found
that the manufacturers software was inferior compared to Kaffeine. A 
person can use Kaffeine
for TV, PVR, playing DVD, CD, ripping, playing audio files mp3,Ogg or 
Wma format and
has great visualisations. You do not have an application in windows that 
can do all this. Well
I ordered 2 more sticks, I put one on my mum's Linux partition (75 years 
old) and she was delighted. I put one one my son's (16 years old) 
computer and he thought it was cool, he calls
me a geek,  I don't care. The Mythtv setup, I will tinker away with it 
for educational purposes. The great thing about Linux is that user's, 
irrespective of age or experience , can do their own
thing within their own freedom. Finally, my wife is so impressed with 
Kaffeine that she is now using  it  regularly for a number of different 
things. I bought that digital TV stick for myself, I
just can't win.

Gordon