getting started with msi tv card

Hi,

Could someone please let me know what I have to do to get my msi 5580 usb digital tv tuner working with linux?
What drivers do I need? What software, what should I do to test it and is it possible to use the remote once it is up and running?

Finally, I'm vission impared, so are there any programs for controling the tv either command line based or gtk? I can't use qt applications. If qt is my only option it's fine, I'll figure out a way for handling this once the card is working.

Also, does this card allow for reccording?

Thanks very much for any help.

Cheers,
Daniel.

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It looks like it may be supported by the following dvb-usb:

config DVB_USB_M920X
tristate "Uli m920x DVB-T USB2.0 support"
depends on DVB_USB
select DVB_MT352 if !DVB_FE_CUSTOMISE
select MEDIA_TUNER_QT1010 if !DVB_FE_CUSTOMISE
select MEDIA_TUNER_TDA827X if !DVB_FE_CUSTOMISE
select DVB_TDA1004X if !DVB_FE_CUSTOMISE
help
Say Y here to support the MSI Mega Sky 580 USB2.0 DVB-T receiver. Currently, only devices with a product id of
"DTV USB MINI" (in cold state) are supported. Firmware required.

(Not sure if the next-to-last line is accurate; the code lists a few devices)

One thing you can do, is to plug your device into the USB port (if you haven't done so already), and check the output of `lsusb' for your device vendor and product IDs, to see if these match those in the source code.

I'm unsure of your level as a beginner, expert, or master of the known linux kernel (except for that weird DVB code), so I can't say much -- you'll need at least the module for m920x.

The source code includes remote control keycodes; make of that what you will.

I'm not so much an end-user (fnar fnar) and instead use my machines as headless servers, and as such I use basic tools that are far from user-friendly for everything.

Similarly for this reason, someone else will have to offer help on convenient end-user applications. (I can offer good commandline suggestions, but gtk' and qt' have on meaning to me)

All supported cards deliver the digital payload to linux, which can then be recorded by writing it to a file, or passed to an application for direct processing (listening and/or viewing), so, yes.

It's up to the application to make this convenient for the user..

So, my suggestion is, plug it in, and see how far you get :-)

barry bouwsma

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Hi Barry,

Does this mean I have to build the kernel?
If so, how do I get to this part of the setup what's it under in make menuconfig for example?

What source code? The stuff you pasted above?

I'm not bad in a console, but I'm mostly a home user I just use it for work music browsing the web etc, and know a bit more. I can compile and patch stuff, and know a tiny bit of c, so thats basically my level. (But I'm not a programmer)

So I just recompile my kernel?

Can you recommend any command line programs? I love using the cli, and if possible I would avoid using gnome.
Can mplayer control the tv?

So, I have to build the right module for my card? Then I need to configure it and get it working with some kind of tv program? Is that right?

If so, how do I find the part in the kernel config to build the module for my tv card, and do I build it as modules or build it into the kernel?

Thanks very much,

Daniel

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It should work with v4l-dvb / Kernel newer than about two years. However, tuner performance is not very good. With weak signal it works better than strong. All remote keys are not working because driver does not upload IR-table to the chip.

Totem, Me-TV, Kaffeine, mplayer, Xine.

yes

Antti

http://palosaari.fi/

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So... My 2.6.26-1 kernel out of aptitude (debian lenny), should work?

ok

Mplayer works with this card? Great!

How would I begin configuring it for mplayer then?

Thanks very much for your help.

Cheers,
Daniel.

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Yes, should work out of the box. No need to install any driver, driver is included in your Kernel.

There is two versions of MSI Megasky 580. Both looks similar, but have still different USB-bridge chip inside. Both are supported. The older one uses m9206 chip and newer gl861 chip. Older needs also firmware. Sometimes older is called as 5580 and newer 5581, number goes from USB-product ID.

I have newer one, gl861 5581, and this is the version which have remote problem. I think older Megasky have all remote buttons functional.

I think mplayer is not very user friendly, try Kaffeine or Me-TV instead. Kaffeine have own channel scanner so it is very easy to configure. Otherwise you will need initial tuning file and then scan to get channels.conf. Try google for more info.

regards
Antti

Hi Antti,

/dev/dvb/adapter0/ is created. so does this mean the right modules have been loaded?

Ah good

I've been googling, and have played with w_scan and me-tv. Kaffeine unfortunately is qt and won't work with braille/speech, but me-tv does. So I got sighted help to scan for channels in kaffeine, the scan didn't find any channels.
Next, I ran the w_scan program, and that as well failed to find any channels. Finally, I ran me-tv and that as well failed. (I selected my location for me-tv).

So, how do I get w_scan or me-tv to find some channels? It's probably not worth talking about kaffeine as I won't be able to use this. I'm plugging my usb receiver into a tv connection in my home which a standard tv would plug into.

Any ideas?

Thanks very much for your help,

Daniel.

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Hi Daniel, I see that while I was asleep (sleep GOOOD), you received more feedback, so I shall try to respond appropriately to parts of all these mails...

Not necessarily -- as it turned out, your distribution seems to include all that you needed pre-built for you.

However, to answer your question -- as part of the long and tedious process of configuring a new kernel, eventually you will reach an item concerning video and related multimedia devices, or something similar. (It has been years since I last went through a from-nothing kernel configuration, so I remember almost nothing about it.) Your device would be listed as one of the many that are available.

Sorry that I am not being more precise -- you do not now need to do this, so I am skipping the details yet offering an overview which may be helpful to you in the future.

This is no longer important, but you asked, so maybe it can help you in the future...

The source code I refer to is that for the linux kernel, and for your device, it would be found in <path-to-your-source>/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-usb in files m920x.*
Here you need to replace <path-to-your-source> with whatever the standard is on your system -- it could be /usr/src/linux-2.6.26 or something completely different -- I actually have no experience with the different distributions, because I keep my own copy of Linus' source tree and make snapshots from that.

Note that at present, you do *not* need to do this, as your distribution has the binary bits you need. But if your curiosity makes you want to learn more about how you can build a new kernel from source, I am not going to try to stop you -- on the contrary, I will encourage you to learn as much as you like!

Thanks, I will try to tune my advice to your level, yet perhaps also keep in mind someone who googles up this reply, with a different level of experience...

Yes, `mplayer' can do this, but it requires a bit of work and perhaps some understanding. Let me explain the latter...

mplayer' is a wonderful all-purpose swiss-army-knife type of media player, that achieves flexibility, but may not seem as polished to the beginner. The man' page alone is often enough to cause a beginner's eyes to glaze over and for them to start going ``wibble'' before they even get to the interesting options.

Due to the flexibility of `mplayer', it needs to try to determine the one out of many many different video formats which it supports, which takes some time when handling a broadcast stream. This results in very slow channel change times, compared with, say, a good hardware-based consumer product.

There are ways to speed this up, because I know that in my experience with broadcast media, I am only going to be seeing (presently) an MPEG Transport Stream from my DVB device, and that will be carrying a payload that will be MPEG 2 video (or maybe H.264), and Layer II or AC3 audio.

I have built a small-footprint version of `mplayer' by manually editing the configuration to only include the code for the video, audio, and container formats that I expect to use that version for (in my case, verifying the integrity of recorded broadcast streams, but not actually sending the output to any video display).

The other thing which can be done, is to call `mplayer' with the commandline options which tell it what demux to use (mpeg ts) and which video and audio codecs to use, which skips most of the autodetection process. This probably will speed up changing channels, to the speed of dedicated utilities that handle a single format, and essentially instantly start to deliver the output when, in my example, I tune into a multicast audio stream.

Now, back to using `mplayer':

It works from a list of channels, which you will need to create using a different utility. It then uses simple keyboard input to cycle through the list of channels (I want to think that `k' and something else are used, but I honestly no longer remember), which is not too bad when you have only a few channels available.

(Unfortunately, in my experience, older versions of `mplayer' have had some problems with keyboard input in some cases, such as after suspending the program, and perhaps when tuning after coming across more than one radio-only service, if I remember. But I have not built and tried a new `mplayer' for some months...)

Read on, as you have already tried without success to get a list of channels...

Also, I have not had experience with the first three applications which Antti listed, but I have used xine' as well as vlc', but I cannot remember how well they worked for me.

Except for `vlc' trying to listen to the multicast audio stream, where some blasted graphical display was invoked and took more than 100% of my CPU and caused audio dropouts, and I saw no way to disable that eye-candy and drop CPU to a near-zero level even on my ten-year-old machines.

You need to create a channels.conf' list of channels that you then place under your ~/.mplayer/ directory. Then if you want to start with a particular channel, you will invoke mplayer' something like `mplayer dvb://"Channel foo" '
or simply as `mplayer dvb:// ' and then change channels to reach the one of interest.

I am going to assume that your distribution already has mplayer' available, and that it has been built with DVB support. But this may be wrong, and it may be that you need to download the mplayer' source, configure it to enable DVB support, and then let it build.

Yes, everything is fine, and you should not need to do anything building a new kernel or new modules.

It may help if you use scan' which is part of the dvb-apps' suite of programs. This makes use of an initial tuning file, and there should be one already available for your location.

I vaguely remember reading that in Australia, use is made of either an offset to the frequency, or of a bandwidth that is different from the rest of the world, which has led to problems with certain firmware. And in fact, looking at the initial scanfiles available for .au, both appear to be so:

# Australia / Melbourne (Mt Dandenong transmitters)
# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy # ABC
T 226500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE
# Seven
T 177500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE
# Nine
T 191625000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE
# Ten
T 219500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE
# SBS
T 536625000 7MHz 2/3 NONE QAM64 8k 1/8 NONE

Make certain that you select the correct initial scan file for your location, available as part of the dvb-apps' package -- here you probably will do best to obtain the latest source via hg' because the scanfiles may not be up-to-date as included in a distribution, although the binary should be mostly unchanged.

While I have the `w_scan' source mirrored, I actually have not taken any time to look at it :-) Perhaps it is not able to find frequencies such as the above...

If you continue to have problems, then later I will ask for information to help troubleshoot -- such as your location, and whether a normal digital TV can receive signals from the same connection. But I am hoping that use of `scan' alone will give you results.

Happy to help. If I have done anything in my replies that has not worked with your vision, then please do not hesitate to give me feedback, so that I can change my way of thinking.

barry bouwsma

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Hi Barry,

Thanks for that, it's good to know, yep, I've built kernels, using make oldconfig many times for a speakup patch i use on my laptop, but that's nice to know.

Ah, that makes sense.

Excellent, I'll look that up when I get to this point. :-)

Ah, ok.

It does.

Not sure about this one.

Um... Ok... Where should this file be located, and am I meant to download it from somewhere?
So does it use this file to create a suitable channels.conf file for mplayer?

Sorry... what's hg?
And once I grab the latest source what should I do to run this scan to create channels.conf? And where do I find the file for my location?

I should check this your right.

Nup, you have done an awesome job.

Thanks very much mate for all your help, and I'm very sorry about all the questions.

Have a good one

Cheers,

Daniel

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Excellent, `oldconfig' is the way I build newer or modified kernels myself.

I have always stripped my kernels down to the bare minimum needed, including modules for hardware I don't yet have or don't know about. So often I need to enable a disabled device. It's easy to do, and I'll give you an example, if you want to try this and see how it works:

Here is the latest .config file I have on a random machine which includes your device as a module (in case I find one that someone has thrown out their window, knowing that is more likely than that I'll buy a new machine with PCIe or something)...

CONFIG_DVB_USB_CXUSB=m
CONFIG_DVB_USB_M920X=m
CONFIG_DVB_USB_GL861=m

If I simply delete the middle line, save this .config file, and `make O=... oldconfig' I will be asked whether I want to add support for the m920x.

If I read upwards from this point in .config, I see some comments that this is reached through:
# Supported USB Adapters
# Multimedia drivers
# Multimedia core support
# Multimedia devices

If I may ask, and I do hope that you do not mind me asking, but as I recall, you wrote that you did have to get help when using one program to try to tune...

How is your level of vision? Are you able to make use of a video image on your display (the television picture), or do you only use an audio-description soundtrack, such as is provided by the larger british and public german broadcasters, among others?

I ask this in case you might be better served by a radio application, or even simple commandline scripts that tune the audio from the six or so available channels, and do not need to bother with a full media player, and so make it much simpler -- my listening to the multicast audio now, is done by three or four building-block utilities piped together at the sending end, and two simple commandline utilities at my listening end, with no need to use a massive, bloated media player (except to check compatibility).

Naturally, if you have some vision, then a full media player like `mplayer' will be a better solution...

You will know when you try it...
spiff% mplayer dvb://
will give you an error. If it cannot find channels.conf' then it has DVB support... But if you have a channels.conf' file and still get an error, then probably you will need to build a new version. You will see when you reach that point...

It may already be included in your distribution, perhaps in /usr/share/somewhere... But it may be fastest if you download the latest version.

First of all, do you have a program called scan' or dvbscan'?

beer@ralph:~$ which scan
/usr/local/bin/scan
beer@ralph:~$ which dvbscan
/usr/local/bin/dvbscan

If not, then you either need to install a binary package, or download and build the source. I will assume you do have `scan' available, to make it easier :-)

That is correct. The scanfile contains the tuning data for the available frequencies and transmitters in your area; from this `scan' tunes these frequencies, and finds the up-to-date available services. This list of services is then written out to stdout, or to a file which can be used as the channels.conf tuning file for mplayer or several other utilities (such as `tzap', part of dvb-apps).

`hg' refers to Mercurial, the source control system used by the dvb-apps package, as well as the linux-dvb kernel module.

Details about this can be found at http://linuxtv.org/ somewhere.

If you already have `scan' in your $PATH (see above), then you can probably use the following URL...
http://linuxtv.org/hg/dvb-apps/file/e91138b9bdaa/util/scan/dvb-t/

The result is a long list (722 items in my local copy) but the au-* files are at the start. Pick the one(s) closest to your location.

Either by invoking scan --help' or scan' alone, you should see a usage message. Basically, you need to tell it to use the au-Whatever file which you downloaded.

No need to be sorry. If I can answer your questions, than that should mean I have an understanding of what you need to know, and how things work. Or that I'm good enough at BS to find work somewhere.

If I cannot, then my experience is not broad enough (which I readily admit), and I hope someone will fill in the missing bits.

If I have done my job, then I should have not only given or hinted at the answers, but also have given the information needed to find these answers as well.

Anway, feel free to ask more questions, either about specific problems you have trying to scan or tune, or more general questions in case you want to know more about some things I have tried not to answer in detail.

thanks,
barry bouwsma

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Hey! That's very cool, thanks for the tip.

No, it's not at all a problem.

I'm almost totally blind, although I do have a little bit of useful vision, not enough for making out picture easily on a computer monitor. But yeah pretty much totally. I use a braille terminal to access my linux box, so yeah, not even enough vision to read, but got to admit, it does come in handy when walking and for orientation. But, it just helps, can't rely on it of course. :-)

Hmmm, yes, I guess if I just got the audio from the tv network that could work, although when having friends or family around and watching tv it might be good to have picture.

Yep, then my version has dvb support.

I have both, sorry I should have said.

Alright, so, I downloaded the file placed it in /tmp, gave it +rw permissions and ran:
sudo scan /tmp/au-melbourne
The scan help didn't make a lot of sense to me, but that seemed to do some stuff like recognise the file, but it found no channels. Are there any options I should have used? Is the default output format correct? Or should I start checking my cables and tv points?

Hey, one other thing, and sorry I know it's really OT, but you said you were a console guy. Have you found a command line web browser with javascript support? Like how do u get around the javascript thing? Unfortunately I have been using firefox for this reason...

Thanks very much for all your help, it's greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Daniel

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Yes, I was thinking about having the video for others, if it would not be so useful for you.

Anyway, I think you will be able to use `mplayer', although if I were in your situation (sorry, I am mostly sighted, but with age, I can be easily called ``blind-as-a-bat'' -- I am nearsighted, which is a blessing when working on micro-sized electronics, or when looking at details, or when counting the number of baby spiders (harmless, the nice thing about having european spiders adopt me as their keeper) currently resident in my pot-of-winter-weeds, so anything more than 20cm away requires glasses, but unfortunately, I have lost flexibility so that while I can see several metres away, I cannot focus on a notebook monitor or nearby screen until I go out and get myself another pair of glasses for working and reading, and so a nice 25x80 console on a 22" widescreen monitor is wonderful regardless of my orientation, state of wakefulness, or state of drunkenness. The 1680x1050 resolution under X11 can be painful at times.)

But I digressed there...

Anyway, for cases where you do not need a display of the video, and only want to listen while you work on other things, and do not need to change between channels all the time, you can easily write a quick script to tune and play the audio. If you still wanted to be able to change between channels easily, I'm sure it would be no problem to write a wrapper script to do this. Then you can pull out `mplayer' when you need it.

Anyway, here is an example (which is for listening to one radio signal from satellite here, but the principle is the same -- the TV audio can be thought of as a radio signal, and tuning via DVB-T is almost the same as tuning via satellite -- because I don't have the scripts to tune audio from DVB-T on the machine I'm working on)...

#!/bin/dash

. /home/beer/sbin/dvb-defs OPERA1

if [ x"$OPERA1" = "x -c 7 " ]
then
echo Cannot make recording, Opera-1 DVB-S receiver not found! >&2 exit 8
fi

/home/beer/bin/dvbstream  -c 1  ${OPERA1}  -T  \
    -s 27500   -p v   -f 12525   -I 2   -D 4   -o  \
    -a 187   $*  \
     |  /home/beer/bin/ts_audio_es_demux  \
      /dev/stdin /dev/stdout /dev/null | nice  /usr/bin/mpg123  -v  ${MPGARGS} -

Basically, this is adapted from the templates I use for recording programming to disk from the commandline, or from cron'. It checks that my tuner is present (left over from the recording usage), and uses dvbstream' which performs the tuning, the following line has the tuning parameters, with the next line giving the PID needed to identify the audio (in this example, it's a newer radio service from Czech Radio).

This is piped into a utility which converts the Transport Stream into an MPEG audio stream, which basically is just removing a few extra bits from the stream, and that is a simple audio stream that plays easily in any of a number of mpeg audio decoder-players, such as `mpg123'.

Okay, first of all, you should be able to do this as a normal user -- not `sudo' (sorry, I've been spending too much time reading Slashdot where people have been discussing the vulnerability of Linux users to malicious worm- and virus-like things, and I've learned that there seems to be a tendency for users to sudo' when it's not really necessary... That is, you can shoot a big hole in your foot with sudo', while without, you can still cause damage, but the hole won't be as big)

Okay, here is where the troubleshooting starts :-)

But first, one useful option would be `-v' to verbosely scan, which can show some details about why you cannot tune.

Yes, this would be where you start to verify that you can receive the same DVB-T channels when connecting a different receiver to your connection.

That is, if `scan' gives no useful output with a scanfile that you know should be correct (and you are welcome to post the results of scanning, either in private mail or cut down to the attempts for two or three frequencies to the mailing list), then there may be a problem outside of your USB tuner and computer.

Out of habit, I do all my browsing with lynx' (my fingers are too ingrained to spend too much time with elinks' or anything else, so it's just habit, not too much a choice).

My attitude to sites with javascript is that I don't bother with them, as I'm searching for info in text format (ASCII PR0N FOR THE MASSES! mplayer supports aalib! no need for me to fire up X to watch my pr0n!), and over a slow link, though when needed, I do download a good JPEG or PDF file.

Unfortunately, that's not a real solution, and I did have to install Iceape to access the configuration of my router, as I'm too cheap to buy one with a ssh interface that allows access to the nvram settings. And that doesn't help you much. While I can be a luddite and refuse to browse sites that require javascript, particularly for simple text info that other sites deliver without script, saying my time would be better spent drinking beer and browsing small breweries that don't need script, the Real World will pass me by.

I'd love to kick these web developers into being forced to using a text-only broswer to review their pages. And I'd like a world peace, free broadband pr0n, and a pony.

Sorry I can't help much there...

barry bouwsma

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Hi Barry,

I'm chopping out the script, just to cut the size of this reply down. But, thanks very much for sending the script, it looks good, and yep, I think I'll find that very useful once I get tv going on my box.

Ah, thanks for the tip, yep I'm in a bad habit of that, thanks for the reminder :-)

Please see the mail I sent directly to you off-list.

I'm connecting it to a co-axle point in my home; I lost the original antenna.
I'm reasonably sure that point should work fine.

I do the same, I love lynx. It is a fantastic browser with a braille terminal, and recently when I have been using speech on my laptop, so I don't have to carry the display around (speech is terrible by itself), lynx works very nice as well.

Ah, ok. I kinda do the same :-)

I ended up doing that since those interfaces aren't nice with lynx or braille (i can use firefox, but they aren't great when it comes to accessibility), so I really like my ssh router.

The voip ata doesn't have ssh and it's just lucky that the interface is managable with a braille display.

No worries, it's just good to know how others handle specific problems.

Thanks very much for all your help with everything.

Cheers,
Daniel.

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Yes, drivers and firmware loaded. It should be all functional.

I think the problem is poor QT1010 tuning performance. You cannot do much for that now. I recommended to get other stick.

regards
Antti

What model/brand tv card would you recommend me to buy? (that is reasonably cheap, doesn't have to do anything fancy). An fm radio tuner would also be nice...

Have a good one,

Daniel

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Hi Daniel, I'm combining the replies to several messages into one response. This includes private mail for which there is no on-list content, but I hope that for the sake of other list-victims, I have included sufficient context...

As I noted earlier (privately), the `tuning status' value gives an indication of what sort of signal your USB stick is seeing.

I've cut most of the following frequencies, because they mirror the above values -- you either see 0x0, 0x4, or 0x6.

Except...

On this particular (UHF) frequency, you actually were able to lock onto a signal. Sadly, this was not enough to get any information from it...

A status value of 0x0 means no signal whatsoever. The values, if you are interested, can be seen in the source file /usr/local/src/linux-2.6.27-rc4/include/linux/dvb/frontend.h (adjust to match your path to the source -- if you are interested, and it is fine if you are not...)

typedef enum fe_status {
        FE_HAS_SIGNAL   = 0x01,   /*  found something above the noise level */
        FE_HAS_CARRIER  = 0x02,   /*  found a DVB signal  */
        FE_HAS_VITERBI  = 0x04,   /*  FEC is stable  */
        FE_HAS_SYNC     = 0x08,   /*  found sync bytes  */
        FE_HAS_LOCK     = 0x10,   /*  everything's working... */

The value 0x6 is obtained by ORing the above CARRIER and VITERBI values. Normally one first gets signal, from which carrier, viterbi, sync, and finally lock follow in quick succession.

Basically, this all means that your tuner sees something, but it can't quite lock onto it.

As Antti has suggested, you may have better luck with a new different card.

As an offside, supposedly the linux-dvb mailing list has been abandoned by every developer, and only a few DVB-freak luddites remain, and in theory, by posting this to the linux-media list I should magically reach thousands of developers who can fix the support for your card. Riiiight.

For these developers, seeing this for the first time, the history behind this thread, including details about the card being discussed, are safely archived on the linux-dvb mailing list over the past three-or-so days.

Personally, I don't expect support for your card to magically materialise, though I'd love to be proved wrong. Generally it's due to lack of adequate documentation provided by the device or chipset manufacturers. I am far removed from this, sad to say.

As I always say, my script itself is probably useless, while the ideas which went into it have value. The general idea is that you use the Unix-type way of thinking of using basic building-block tools stacked together to come up with the desired result.

This requires one to think at the building-block level, which may not yet be at your level -- but once you reach it, if you do, then you have an understanding which almost brings you to the level of `master of the known universe'.

I'll go over this quickly...

First of all, from the transmitter to your tuner is something which I will just say is a black box for now, and you don't need to know more about it, because that won't help you under Linux -- though it would if you were to be an engineer or hardware developer, and you need to know details of modulation and the like.

Where Linux comes into play is the payload carried by the broadcast. This is in the form of a (partial) Transport Stream, which you will be able to obtain from your device.

There are many different ways to get at this stream, for example, tzap' and cat' from the DVB device, or using `dvbstream' in my example. Generally, they are all similar, in that the end result is the Partial Transport Stream.

Which leads me to mention that the particular script I provided has the custom flag -T' not present in normal dvbstream' which simply causes it to Terminate if it can't tune or open the output file or whatever. But that's trivial.

The next thing to note, is that I then convert the Partial Transport Stream into an Elementary Stream, or more simply, just the audio payload, which corresponds to an mp2 file. That's essentially an mp3 file.

Again, there are more-than-one ways to do this. The example I gave is my own hack, as you won't find ts_audio_es_demux' anywhere, save maybe Google in reference to this and similar threads. This is based on the ts_es_demux', part of a family of DVB/MPEG utilities, which I've hacked to do no more than search for the audio stream.

And naturally, you can use any audio player, be it mpg123, mpg321, madplay, or probably dozens of others.

The idea is that at each step, you know what you have, and you know how to handle it. That's the alternative to the all-inclusive media player, that could be overkill, or probably uses an interface that is not compatible with your vision-impaired userland.

Ahhh. Sorry, I just needed to say all that...

I will take your word for it; you are welcome to still have doubts. However, if others in your home are able to tune digital TV signals, then that pretty much points to your device as having problems.

Particularly if, as Antti has said, your device works poorly with strong signals.

In the mail you sent off-list, all the VHF channels had problems (status 0x0,4,or 6) while the UHF channel did once briefly get a lock -- still not enough to actually tune anything.

In place of the original antenna, you can try a short length of wire, say, 5cm long for the UHF frequency, to about half a metre for the other frequencies. This will, depending on your distance from the transmitter, give a weaker signal that may tune. Or maybe not.

Also noteworthy is whether the signal is horizontally or vertically polarised; I personally don't know this, as I'm halfway around the world from you...

I have worried that what I write might not work when converted to speech. Probably I should not worry, but be certain that I do not attempt any ASCII graphics that depend on sight, and of a whole screen. If, by mistake, I have done this, please give me the slap I deserve...

Of course, minutes after I wrote that, I came across a brewery whose two pages of links were entirely javascript. Sadly it's a small, non-local brewery that out of principle I prefer to support, and I don't need javascript to travel to the somewhat-distant shop where I'd get that beer, but that was the reminder I needed that the world is not as friendly as Slashdot, The Register, and Wikipedia for useful^[citation needed] text-only info...

This will need input from others with experience...

If you want FM radio, you'll be looking at a hybrid device, which combines DVB-T ability with analogue tuning.

Availability seems to depend a lot on geographic region, so you are going to want to hear from someone also in Australia who can offer suggestions.

Sadly, I bet I've scared off anyone who could help, as I've written so much...

Anyway, for the one or two readers who have made it this far, GET A LIFE!!1! I mean, sorry, here is some more info that may be useful, based on my experience in europe with broadcasters that provide additional services for audience members with aural or visual difficulties -- or which I take advantage of as a non-native where dialects cause problems, or simply if I want to listen at a low volume to not disturb the neighbours or sleeping girlfriend...

You have asked about options to `scan'. I've said that they don't matter for tuning, as first of all you need to receive a signal you can work with, and this has so far been a problem.

Eventually you will be able to tune the different stations available to you. Then, the default `scan' output will be lacking -- it only shows the primary video and audio information, and gives no details about additional services such as teletext, or a second audio-commentary channel. Of course, I don't know if the broadcasters available to you offer the latter service, but I'll assume they are as enlightened as the public service british or german broadcasters and that generally a second audio track is available.

If it isn't, stop reading now...

Anyway, `scan' offers a few different output formats, with the non-defaults offering details about any additional audio streams. If you are going to write your own scripts to tune the audio, and the alternative audio services are available around the clock as they are in the above-mentioned german/british broadcasts via satellite, then you will likely want to use the second audio channel with audiodescription. So...

Here is the `vdr' output from the BBC as an example:

BSkyB - BBC 1 London:10773:h:S28.2E:22000:5000:5001,5002:5003:0:6301:32:2045:0

The difference for you is that in the audio PID field, you no longer see the single PID of 5001, but instead, you see both 5001 and 5002, with the latter being used for narrative/audiodescription, which presumably will be of more interest to you.

The other output format is `pids', and here's that from back in 2006, before the use of the second audio channel on the german broadcasters became widespread (last year):

ZDF (0x6d66) 01: PCR == V V 0x006e A 0x0078 \
(deu) 0x0079 (2ch) TT 0x0082 AC3 0x007d

Here PID 0x79 is tagged as `2ch' (it's NAR for the Beeb), and covers both audiodescription and occasional original- language (mostly english language) broadcasts without overdubbing. This was before DVB subtitles were introduced.

Oh, here's an old BBC `pids' output, also including subtitles:

BBC 1 London (0x189d) 01: PCR == V V 0x1388 A 0x1389 \
(eng) 0x138a (NAR) TT 0x138b SUB 0x138c

So, when you do get a useful signal, then you can use the additional options to `scan' to see what PIDs may be present for additional dedicated audio channels used for audio commentary. I suspect these would be your preferred audio channels.

Hope this is useful,
barry bouwsma

G'day Daniel, I just came up with a couple more ideas that could be worth mentioning, that you can keep in mind for the future...

Now, I want to mention in detail the TT (teletext) and SUB (subtitle) services, at least, how they are implemented in this part of europe -- other parts of the world will likely be different, but my purpose is to throw around ideas in the hope that something will stick to the ceiling and be interesting and possibly useful.

I mentioned that I find the nearly 100% penetration of subtitles to be quite useful to me personally, although it and in-field signing are intended for people whose hearing is not so good as mine, but whose vision is intact.

The subtitles are sent in both a selected teletext page, as well as a separate DVB-subtitle stream. Unfortunately, the support that mplayer' has for DVB subtitles last I knew, is, well, bad to none, and basically requires completely rewriting that bit. xine' worked better some months ago, but at that time had some timing problems.

Anyway, as I understand it, DVB subtitles are sent as bitmaps, which unfortunately makes it difficult for you to use them. This also explains the difference in appearance between the BBC subtitles and those of ITV. However, I haven't seen mangled fonts due to transmission errors, while I have seen incorrect yet properly-formed characters at times. So my understanding of DVB subtitles is far from complete or correct.

Standard teletext, as was introduced with analogue transmissions as part of the vertical blanking interval, has been carried over to DVB broadcasts. In the case of the BBC, this is mostly limited to subtitles on page 888, while the german services I've mentioned offer full text services, occasionally including subtitles, but on a limited set of programmes. Only the ZDF has both teletext and DVB subtitles at present, of the german public broadcasters. These DVB subtitle fonts again differ in appearance from any of the british public broadcasters.

In the UK, the move has been away from conventional teletext with the introduction of digital services, replacing it with an MHEG-based service. In germany, there has been a push to supplement regular teletext with an MHP-based service, but for lack of interest and readily-available hardware, this has pretty much died out or stagnated.

I seem to recall that in Australia, use is made of an MHEG service. I don't know if a regular teletext service is available -- you will see this in the results, when you have a tuner capable of scanning.

Now, ideally, a teletext service, being text-based, can be trivially converted to braille or spoken. I'm not sure about the MHEG services, as they seem to place more importance on the on-screen appearance, yet they do use a TrueType font.

Anyway, while conventional teletext is not simple ASCII-like, it is based on a hamming of a limited character set which can be converted back to a standard 128- or 256-character set font, and of course the normal characters can be displayed as braille.

Now, here is an example of some of the useful information to be found on a full teletext service, to show that, if it were available to you, you might find it interesting. This is a page giving inter-bank exchange rates from the Euro to your own currency, and is meant as an example (it's in german, but should be trivial to understand)

                    /GIP  IG*** PHOENIX Mi 21.01.09 18:01:45
                         PHOENIX.text                   2/2
                         Devisenkurse
                     Letzte Datenabfrage        Diff.  Kurs-
                     21.01.09, 18:00 Uhr        Vortag zeit

                     USA....... (USD)   1,2857  -0,20% 17:59
                     GB........ (GBP)   0,9369  +0,94% 17:59
                     Schweiz... (CHF)   1,4767  -0,13% 17:59
                     Japan..... (JPY) 112,9800  -2,35% 17:59

                     Kanada.... (CAD)   1,6365  +0,37% 17:59
                     Südafrika. (ZAR)  13,0970  -1,05% 17:50
                     Hongkong.. (HKD)   9,9990  +0,07% 17:49
                     Singapur.. (SGD)   1,9401  -0,13% 17:50
                     Australien (AUD)   1,9804  -0,23% 17:59
                     Neuseeland (NZD)   2,4637  -0,78% 17:49
                     Indien.... (INR)  63,3633  +0,36% 17:49
                     China..... (CNY)   8,8013  +0,03% 17:15
                     Mexiko.... (MXN)  17,9189  -0,85% 17:49
                     Argentin.. (ARS)   4,4618  +0,33% 17:16
                     Brasilien. (BRL)   3,0380  -0,73% 17:54

                                             Sortenkurse ->

(reproduced without permission, sorry)

Unfortunately, relatively few programmes are sent with any subtitles, and I'm having to dig deeply in my snapshots of teletext pages to find an example I can show, instead of

                    //   X G*** PHOENIX Mi 21.01.09 18:01:38
                                        KEINE UNTERTITEL

(no subtitles)

More unfortunately, I've just verified that my utility is not recognizing and writing to disk the subtitles that are currently being broadcast on page 150 by one particular broadcaster, so it's back to the coding for me... Meaning, I can't paste an example here.

However, my point is that if this type of service is broadcast in your area, you may find it interesting and useful, as you would be able to make use of the text content within.

Just an idea which I had...

By the way, I don't know how foreign non-english-language films would be handled by your broadcasters. In general, the text- based subtitles are not sent when there are on-screen subtitles, for example, when the BBC screens a film in its native language and subtitles. That means that, for example, the film ``Lola Rennt'' was sent out with the primary audio channel containing the original german, and no teletext subtitles, with the translation into english appearing as part of the video signal, meaning that you can't make use of it, nor could you make use of the audio (if you understand german, then substitute french, portuguese, japanese, or some other language which has been broadcast as original-with-subtitles). Other broadcasters tend to dub everything of serious commercial value into the native language with the same limited number of voice talent, so the issue of original audio versus subtitles doesn't come up. The cultural channel `arte' is somewhat an exception, where via the different satellite positions you might find dubbed german, dubbed french, and original english, subtitles in french or german, or original language broadcasts in the `trash' series of cinematic gems with on-screen subtitles in either french or german, keeping out those audience members unable to understand the original and unable to see the on-screen subtitles...

barry bouwsma

Hi Barry,

Sorry about the delay, I was out of town for a few days.

I look forward to finding out... :-)

Braille..., what format do they originate in? Is it tv signal, or some kind of text guide or something?

oh... ok

<snip>

Thanks, that looks interesting, so does it all depend on what service is available here in Australia?

Indeed, thanks very much.

Cheers,

Daniel.

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Daniel Dalton wrote:

[Now, ideally, a teletext service, being text-based, can be]

The teletext service I hope you would be able to get, is sent as part of the digital service. Here I will quickly explain that a Transport Stream, which is used by DVB-T, mixes together digital versions of several services, including audio soundtrack, or radio, as well as video signals, and additional data services, with each component being able to be identified by its own ID.

A conventional set-top-box will convert the video from its digital form to an analogue equivalent, then convert the audio soundtrack into its analogue form, and decode and add the teletext to the video signal, perhaps also including its own internal teletext decoder for user convenience.

Then these analogue signals are delivered to your tv by one of many means, be it as an RGB signal through a SCART connector, or in the worst case, by modulating an RF carrier.

But your Linux machine will be working with the Transport Stream directly, selecting the particular IDs of interest. When you look at that particular ID, you see merely a datastream including the payload.

So, just as your TV audio will be carried in a form which will be similar to the mp3 files you've certainly used, or whatever format, you can also write the teletext data to a file and work with that.

When you get your tuner working, or one that does, if you do receive a teletext service, I'll guide you through the steps needed to actually see the content being broadcast.

As a little teaser, I will paste part of a hexdump of an update to today's rates of the example I posted earlier.

000001c0  20 20 20 20 20 cb 61 6e  61 64 61 ae ae ae ae 20  |     .anada.... |
000001d0  a8 43 c1 c4 29 83 20 20  31 2c b6 31 38 37 02 20  |.C..).  1,.187. |
000001e0  ab b0 2c b3 37 25 07 31  32 ba b0 37 20 d3 fd 64  |..,.7%.12..7 ..d|
000001f0  61 e6 f2 e9 6b 61 ae 20  a8 da c1 52 29 83 20 31  |a...ka. ...R). 1|
00000200  b3 2c b3 37 b6 31 02 20  ab b0 2c b5 b6 25 07 31  |.,.7.1. ..,..%.1|
00000210  31 ba b5 b0 20 c8 ef 6e  67 6b ef 6e 67 ae ae 20  |1... ..ngk.ng.. |
00000220  a8 c8 cb c4 29 83 20 31  b0 2c 32 b5 b6 37 02 20  |....). 1.,2..7. |
00000230  ab b0 2c 31 b6 25 07 31  31 ba 34 b9 20 d3 e9 6e  |..,1.%.11.4. ..n|

There are some readable parts of words (Canada, Hongkong) to be seen in the ASCII dump at the right, but it is not quite a simple text dump.

The program I hacked to display this in text form does the conversion into ASCII with the added characters for the particular language in use.

So, to answer your question, essentially it is a text guide.

Now, the MHEG service, in contrast, is Java based, and I have downloaded a good number of files, both text and binary, that would be used to display a particular page. However, I can't see a simple way to get at the text info within and display it. That would be for someone who has studied and understands this service.

That is correct. One more thing I should note, is that this text type of teletext supports, and broadcasters generally make heavy use of, features such as colours, double-height and blinking characters, and in particular, parts of character blocks that can be used to create simple graphics. Think of some sort of ASCII art, or, with the most common use made of these graphics by commercial broadcasters, ASCII pr0n.

DANGER! ASCII PR0N PASTED BELOW! SENSITIVE READERS SHOULD AVERT THEIR GAZE OR SKIP TO THE NEXT MESSAGE! ^L
I MEAN IT! IT COULD QUALIFY AS EXTREME PORN! ^L
THAT'S IT, I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS!

This pr0n is made worse by the fact that my console font does not include the full range of teletext partial blocks, so I've substituted characters such as *' and X' to try and give a feel for how the graphics should appear. Maybe a full Unicode X font will include such characters and I can simply map them to UTF8, but I'm primarily interested in the text content information on my text console.

Here's the pr0n...

█X█X*XX*???*?██ XXX* AMI
█X?█??*█ █X?* █ **XXXX

No, this is not going to work. There are too many characters which are not yet converted to something and I'm having to add as `?' by hand. Anyway, the blocks on the left are used to form words; to the right the blocks would be forming the top of a female head.

auszuziehen.Magst *X*███XX*██
Du mir die Kleider *XX████X* ██
vom Leib reissen? XX██████* X█*

At the right, part of a stomach and arm

Well, anyway, if these non-ASCII full blocks have made it through intact and are diplaying correctly anywhere, that is an example of the crude (in more than one sense of the word) images one can make from the text medium of teletext.

And as far as colour -- the background would be black, with the blocks-forming-letters as well as the text yellow, and the female image formed from red partial blocks.

Ah, another UTF8 project for me to add to my list...

barry bouwsma

Ah, right.

Alright then, thanks very much.

ah, ok... I kinda get it... :-)

Thanks very much Barry for all your help with everything, I greatly appreciate it.

Cheers,

Daniel.

Actually, your mutt' mailer has managed to convert the UTF-8 encoding which I hope you received into ASCII and substituted its own ?' for those block characters which should have appeared as correct UTF-8, though I'll need to check an archive.

And after quite a few too many hours, I still don't get it, and I'm going to have to ask help from the collective knowledge pooled here.

I've seen that the 10646 encoded fonts available usually have the familiar box-drawing and related characters I've partly been able to use for a few of the graphics.

Unfortunately, these seem to be either based on a 2x2 set of quads, or a 3x4 array. While the teletext graphics in use uses a 2x3 array.

I've come upon two sets of fonts which supposedly cover the teletext character set with a 10646 encoding. But the first one, which does include the 2x3 graphics chars that otherwise need a `fontspecific' encoding, seems to have hijacked existing assigned unicode characters in order to display the graphics.

That is, with this font, these characters no longer display properly (selection limited due to pasting from a 512-char console font)

[◆]  U+25C6   ◆  BLACK DIAMOND
[◊]  U+25CA   ◊  LOZENGE
This is matched by reading the code:
const wchar_t graphutf8[128] = { // Graphic characters on an unicode terminal ISO-10646
[...]
        0x25A0,0x25A1,0x25A2,0x25A3,0x25A4,0x25A5,0x25A6,0x25A7, 
[...]
        0x25B0,0x25B1,0x25B2,0x25B3,0x25B4,0x25B5,0x25B6,0x25B7, 
[...]
        0x25C0,0x25C1,0x25C2,0x25c3,0x25C4,0x25C5,0x25C6,0x25C7, 

[...] 0x25D8,0x25D9,0x25DA,0x25DB,0x25DC,0x25DD,0x25DE,0x25DF, };

I'm still trying to determine whether the second font has any graphics and where they would be hidden -- even the handy
[█] U+2588 &#9608; FULL BLOCK
character is missing.

Does anyone know whether the various 2x3 graphics used in teletext fonts are in fact present in Unicode? I haven't been able to convince google to give me the answer I want. I would think that with everything I do see with a unifont font, that such widely-used characters wouldn't have been left out...

thanks for any pointers,
barry bouwsma

Hi Barry,

Right.

Alright then.

ok

ok

What kind of wire? Ear phone? and how do I hook this up to the receiver since it has a co-axle input plug on it.

Nup, you've done a great job. When using mutt and brltty with my braille terminal, I've never come across anything I couldn't read (yet:-)) And that's been over a year.

I'm probably going to buy off ebay.

lol :-)

thanks very much Barry, that information is very useful indeed.

Have a good one

Daniel.

The type of wire should not matter. In fact, you may not even need to make contact between the metal of the coaxial connector and the wire conductor for a very strong signal -- although ideally you would make this contact.

The idea behind this is that Antti has suggested that your tuner may not work well with strong signals, so we are wanting to get a somewhat weaker signal. It could be, though, that you will not get enough of a signal. This all will depend on the distance you are from the transmitter site, the power it sends, and what sort of terrain exists between you and the sender.

One thing has popped into my mind -- there are different standards for coaxial connectors used in different parts of the world for the same function, so I may have a totally different idea of what you have...

Anyway, you are connected to your wall by a cable that connects to your device. Perhaps that cable is connected to some sort of push-on or screw-on connector, or maybe it is firmly attached to the wall without a connector.

The part of the connector of interest will be the centre conductor. Through europe, this exists on TV-type tuners as an outer ring, somewhat over 1cm diametre, and a smaller ring inside with a couple millimetre diametre. I can actually take a length of bell wire or thin electrical wire, fold about 1cm of it over on itself, and stick this into that centre conductor to make a simple antenna that receives strong signals.

If you have a screw-on type of F connector, that was common for cable TV in america when I was there, but in europe is found primarily on satellite equipment, then the part that connects to the wall will have a centre conductor which extends somewhat, if you are lucky. This can be a bit tricky, but a clip lead, with small alligator clip can be of help, particularly if the F connector cannot be readily screwed off.

Now, for the other type of F connector -- the female type, one can simply stick in the end of some bell wire, after removing a cm of insulation.

The problem is that I personally can't imagine myself doing this without sight, because it's too easy to cause a short-circuit between the outer and inner conductors, which means your reception will drop to zero, and I rely on visual feedback to see this. So if you have some technically-minded friend who can help you with this, it may be easiest.

(There are no dangerous voltages to be found on these sort of antenna connectors. In strong signal areas, I can get a good signal simply with my finger on the inner conductor, possibly moistened for better conductivity. This is not to say that your equipment will be at earth potential, as all this depends on the presence of and quality of your earth ground, and in fact whether all your devices make use of it, as I'm often zapped lightly when connecting USB devices to an earthed computer, due to the lack of earthing on said devices. At worst, your tuner may deliver 5v to power an active antenna, but nothing to throw you across the room.)

Actually, 5cm wire for the UHF frequency in use might be a bit short, so you may be better with 20 to 100cm overall.

Another thing to keep in mind, though it won't be as important as it is with a rooftop-mounted antenna, is the polarisation of the radio signals from the transmitter; the scanfiles I see here don't give any hints to that for your area, and my internet connection presently is too poor for me to look online.

Anyway, good luck; it could be that with this you are unable to receive any signal whatsoever, in which case all the time I spent writing this will have been for nought, and, unless some other brilliant idea reveals itself, you will be forced to go the path of obtaining a different tuner and hoping that one works out-of-the-box...

barry bouwsma

Ah, right, I'll give that ago, thanks.

There is a connector on the wall, and I guess an aerial on the roof.

Ah, ok. I think I get it now... Makes sense.

Yep, I'll see if I can get some help.

Thanks.

Oh... I'm sorry... I'll give it ago anyway and see what happens, and if it doesn't work, I'll look online for alternative tuners.

Thanks very much,

Daniel.