> On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 08:28:51PM +0000, Chris. Aubrey-Smith wrote:
>> From time to time, I try to enliven a dull evening by making yet another
>> attempt to get my Twinhan Alpha 7045A USB TV tuner to work on one of my
>> Debian ThinkPads. To the best of my ability, I've followed every piece
>> of
>> advice and guidance I can find, but with the results below:
>
>> T42:/home/chris# xawtv -hwscan
>>
>> This is xawtv-3.95.dfsg.1, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.18-6-686)
>>
>> looking for available devices
>>
>> port 73-73
>>
>> type : Xvideo, image scaler
>>
>> name : ATI Radeon Video Overlay [Intel (R) Video Overlay on my X30]
>>
>> T42:/home/chris# xawtv -tvscan
>>
>> This is xawtv-3.95.dfsg.1, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.18-6-686)
>>
>> can't open /dev/video0: No such file or directory
>>
>> v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
> [snip]
>> no video grabber device available
>
> You're using the wrong tools. The TwinHan DTV Alpha devices are
> *digital* TV devices, but V4L (aka video4linux) is for *analogue*
> devices.
>
> You need at minimum the dvb-utils and dvbstream packages. dvbtune
> is probably helpful, too. The first half of the article at [1] should
> explain a bit of how to use them.
>
> Hugo.
>
> [1] http://carfax.org.uk/docs/DVB
If you are only interested in simple TV watching, then it is much simpler
to use something like Kaffine, or mplayer / xine to actually tune your
channels.
Follow the instructions on hugo's site to create your channels.conf, then
place it in the .mplayer .xine directory as appropriate.
For Kaffine it should just pick up the DVB device and let you use it, I
don't think it even needs the scan file as it is capable of scanning by
itself.
For mplayer you can then watch a TV channel with mplayer by doing, for
example:
mplayer "dvb://BBC ONE"
Where BBC ONE is the name of the channel from the scan file.
Then if you wish to "record" that program you can dump it to disk by doing:
mplayer -dumpfile myfilename.ts "dvb://BBC ONE"
Much easier than using tzap etc. although a bit less flexible.
