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Installing and Using a USB ATSC TV Card with Me TV in Linux Lite

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gold_finger:

--- Quote from: N4RPS on May 13, 2014, 04:13:38 AM ---After installing the software, all I had to do was plug in the dongle, rebooted, and fired up Me TV. On a couple of my laptops, everything was pretty much automatic. It gave me the option to automatically scan for over-the-air channels. Using an amplified antenna, it detected 25 channels in my area.
--- End quote ---

Thanks for this -- very helpful!  Have been curious about these TV things, but never tried one myself.

Just one question out of sheer ignorance on my part -- is the "amplified antenna" something separate, or is it part of the dongle?


P.s.  I wonder if this might be better in the tutorial section so it doesn't get lost.

N4RPS:
Hello, All!

Having used a Hauppauge WinTV USB dongle in Windows 7/8, I've noticed that the software produced by them just doesn't work very well. You're lucky to get it to work an entire hour without it 'locking up' on you.

For the sake of curiosity, I wanted to see if it worked better in Linux, and found that this device works MUCH better in Linux. My guess is that it's because the CPU workload for Linux itself is far less in Linux than in Windows 7 or 8, as trying to do this sort of thing is very processor-intensive.

This is my experience with installing and using this dongle with the Me TV software, which will detect many types of TV cards. First, I installed the needed software. Using a terminal window, I added the Me TV PPA like this:


--- Code: ---sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-tv-development/ppa
--- End code ---

I then typed the following:


--- Code: ---sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dvb-apps w-scan me-tv
--- End code ---

After installing the software, all I had to do was plug in the dongle, rebooted, and fired up Me TV. On a couple of my laptops, everything was pretty much automatic. It gave me the option to automatically scan for over-the-air channels. Using an amplified antenna, it detected 25 channels in my area.

With a couple of other laptops, I was asked to select a channels.conf file to configure the channel list. To create this list, I had to use the scan command in a terminal window to create this file. The syntax is as follows:


--- Code: ---scan /usr/share/dvb/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB >channels.conf
--- End code ---

This lets the scan command use the dongle to scan every US digital channel to find the ones used in one's area, and to create a channels.conf file in the home directory. One can then select this file to load the channels into Me TV. (In the /usr/share/dvb directory, there are some sample channels.conf files for detecting cable TV channels and ATSC digital channels for a few major US cities.)

Other here use MythTV to do this, but doing so requires one to either compile everything from source or install Mythbuntu. I was not able to make either solution work - Me TV was FAR easier.

May this help others in the future...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

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