Set-top box mode becomes more and more interesting, as cheap backbone computers with DVI-D output produce good looking output on cheap 27" LCD (TV-)displays. Together a typical hardware investment of 1200-1500€. In such a scenario LIRC becomes a must - and ZapDvb 0.50 will support it well. It will also provide an easy way to configure which tools or players get started and how they are controlled via LIRC. Give it a try!
It turns out that LIRC support is a tremendous improvement, so it should be made as good as possible and it should be well documented so that many user can profit from it. But version 0.50 is not yet ready for release! The current version is 0.49 which contains already most of the LIRC stuff.
Although version 0.49 is the alpha-test for some 0.50 features (new GUI stuff), you should install it to replace 0.43 .
In this release the long promised JavaScript GUI
gets introduced, but it is not yet enabled by default. You might
want to edit your zapdvb.conf (insert
guikde=kjscmd in section [zapmcc]) to
enable it. Please send a bug report if it does not work for you.
Debian users should know that they
need to run "apt-get install kjscmd" to install the
required JavaScript engine.
Compared to the traditional kdialog based GUI the
new one works much faster and is easier to use (single mouse
click). A few new GUI features were added (see Video/DVD playback
and the wizzard mode used to enter recording jobs). Also the new
mode coexists nicely with GNOME. Another feature is the console
(e.g. text mode) - ZapDvb now works even in
framebuffer mode without X11. In frame buffer mode (e.g. no DISPLAY
environment variable is set) always command number 9 is used. Here
is an example:
[zapdvb] # Use this or similar to watch TV in frame buffer mode ... cmdview9=mplayer -really-quiet -cache 2048 -fs -zoom -vo fbdev2 -autosync 0 [zapcvt] # Add entries for cmdXXX9 to support frame buffer mode ...
MPlayer is working but switching into the right framebuffer mode can take a while. The fbxine program can do better but refuses to play MPEG2 from stdin.
The check that zapmcc did to find out if KDE is running has been relaxed. If only X11 is running it can now still start in KDE mode (this happens to GNOME users if they have at least a minimum of KDE installed). Working over ssh (with the video editor) is supported now. Here some examples:
# Force the GUI to start in KDE mode (X11 required) ... zapmcc kde nowait # Force the GUI to start in text mode ... zapmcc cmd nowait # Start the MPEG Editor from a console (or konsole) window ... zapmcc edit # From inside GNOME or in a ssh session this will open # another konsole window, use 'cmd' to run in text mode. # Opened in a konsole window the editor uses that window.
Version 0.43 is the last of three intermediate releases to clean-up things. The improvements include:
(*) If a DVD is not copy protected you can mount it and use the editor's load command with the mount point as argument. You will see a list of VOB files. Pick the ones that you want to grab and type save. Currently the DVD audio is not converted but mplayer/xine can read it.
(**) This works on SuSE 9.3, try 'setup install -'. On a 64-bit system unfortunately some DVB drivers don't work with the 32-bit version of ZapDvb.
Version 0.42 is the second of three intermediate releases to clean-up things (and to write documentation - the README files now provide a lot of information on how to configure ZapDvb). Other improvements include:
Since version 0.41 the set-top box mode is much easier to configure, the default X11 config that comes with it (VESA mode) should work on most computers without change (you will need mplayer). The setup script now tries harder than ever to make the installation easy. After an rpm or deb install and after you have verified that zapdvb works on your machine, you should run that script as a root user to enable the advanced features.
Other changes: DVD-Playback now supports "view" formats, KDE's Juk is now the default audio player, better support for keyboard shortcuts and finally: more documentation.
What if you want to watch TV at some place without having a DVB card (or the antenna cable) available? Or what if your server has a DVB card and you want to schedule recordings from a client computer? These problems are solved by the new remote mode since version 0.40. ZapDvb has now become network transparent!
You can now define "view" formats (see [views] in zapdvb.conf) that allow you together with Mplayer to crop/scale your picture to fit optimal to your monitor. This works with recorded streams (since 0.30) and with life TV (since 0.40). You can also tag your files with the "view" name and other information, the video editor supports this feature.
Knoppix is a fully configured system (in contrast to Debian Sarge). Just download and install Zapdvb, most likely it will work. You can even experiment with the set-top box mode without harming an installed system (unfortunately xine/kaffeine don't work well for this).
sudo dpkg -i your_zapdvb.deb # install it (most GUI stuff should work now) # change to console mode using Alt-F2 cd /usr/local/share/zapdvb # the install folder ./setup config # advance setup stuff init 1 # stop KDE session FAKE=1 ./zapdvb_box # launch set-top box mode
Debian (and Knoppix) problems with UTF-8: Debian Sarge (and Knoppix) do not use an utf-8 based system default locale. Consider reconfiguring your locale setting before installing ZapDvb:
dpkg-reconfigure locales # RUN THIS FROM A REAL CONSOLE NOT FROM KDE!
# Do not use a UTF-8 with "@euro"
# - otherwise KDE will get confused!
Also consider exporting the LANG variable from /etc/profile. ZapDvb tries to circumvent these problems. If the program recode is installed (Knoppix has it by default) the installation converts some files from UTF-8 to the current locale.
Debian and Knoppix: Radio sounds broken: Debian has a mechanism called "alternatives" that tries to map generic application names to these applications that are really installed. In our case the (working) audio player mpg123 is mapped to the installed but unusable audio player mpg321. You should 1st remove this insane mapping:
update-alternatives --remove mpg123 /usr/bin/mpg321
update-alternatives --list mpg123 # check the result
If it worked mpg123 should no longer be listed. As a next step install mpg123:
apt-get install mpg123
After this procedure zapdvb should be capable of playing radio channels.
Radio without sound: In some cases you better run mpg123 via artsdsp (see zapdvb.conf).
Problems with Xine and Kaffeine: Xine does not work well in set-top box mode. Kaffeine is quite slow and misbehaves sometimes. Neither Xine nor Kaffeine provide enough support for the ZapDvb view mode feature (aspect ratios). Use MPlayer if you plan to use ZapDvb frequently or on a non-4:3 display!
Set-top Box dialog not shown on 1st start: For an unknown reason the main dialog gets sometimes not shown. Workaround: restart (using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace).
MPlayer and gcc 3.2 .. 3.4: Anti aliasing seems to be broken in gcc. MPlayer produces some "under water sound effect" when compiled with -O4. Modify config.mak (after configure has run) to contain "-O2 -fno-strict-aliasing" instead of the "-O4". Solved in Debian Sarge!
MPlayer/mpg123 and KDE: (1) sometimes the KDE window manager decides to display MPlayer without boarder and title - inconvenient but not serious (2) most players/viewers do not support arts - configure the KDE Sound-System (from the Control Center) so that artsd automatically suspends itself after being idle for 5s. When MPlayer or mpg123 start they will wait until arts releases the sound device.
Scheduled recording: Since SuSE 9.0 the atd demon is not active by default. At is used for timed recording jobs. From a root shell issue the command "insserv atd" to repair this problem. Zapdvb-0.30 and later do this automatically and also activate cron which is used for periodic recording.
Files larger 2 GByte: Linux and many tools now handle large files correctly. Even KDE since 3.2 does so in many places. Unfortunately neither Xine nor MPlayer allow to navigate inside large files when they are read from a server (via SMB). Even worse: the kernel module smbfs (2.4 and 2.6!) fails to create or seek files larger then 2 GBtye, see below. This is still a problem with kernel 2.6.11 - nobody repaired the broken smbfs, try to use cifs instead.
Favour FTP over SMB to copy large files: On a 100 MBit/s link FTP is much faster than SMB (even ssh is). But KDE's Konqueror before version 3.3 (expected release date 08/2004) doesn't handle FTP (and SMB) efficiently. The problem has been fixed. The zapcut video editor can be configured to use ssh for server uploads - which works fine.
This is beta6 which is a 1st release candidate. Please upgrade to this version and report bugs!
Compared to version 0.20 this release has many new features. The is now "feature complete and stable" but some documentation has still to be (re-)written. Capturing (time-shift), DVB-C, DVB-T and DVB-S are now supported. The former ZapTvOut project has been integrated (DVB Set-top Box mode).
From the download page you can get a binary rpm for SuSE 9.1 or the sources to build from (which is easy). You will need reasonably recent DVB drivers, see below.
The content of the zapdvb.conf file (in /usr/local/bin) has changed since version 0.20 - save your current channel list before installing! You can then copy your current channel list back to zapdvb.conf - the new version can handle multiple channel lists.
With the exception of some minor issues the zapdvb 0.2 software and the Metzler 1.17 driver (including an unofficial I2C patch to make them work with Linux 2.4.18 and later) have been stable. On the download page I made them now the current versions.
Xine has made big progress and can handle the files that the video edit program zapcut (script around zapcvt) creates. Using zapcut is a fast and reliable way to remove ads from recorded tv programs.
Unfortunately the Metzlers could not bring their driver into the 2.6 kernel. The new official drivers (from SuSE 9.1 and www.linuxdvb.org) are not yet stable or do not work for KNC-1. For the 2.6 user I provide a snap-shot of the linuxdvb project's CVS that works well with SuSE 9.1 and KNC-1 (some other cards should also function).
I have started another project to demonstrate how a Bare-bone PC can be used as a Set-Top box. This stuff is in a very early stage. My plans are to integrate kZapDvr and zapcut. Currently kZapDvb is integrated and you can play DVDs.
- The video edit and conversion tool zapcvt was added.
- The MPlayer documentation was written, some other html pages were updated.