Linux weekend

One of the biggest issues with moving my HTPC to Linux is my TV card. Although the machine is used for lots of different things, without the TV recording and guide functionality, there's really no need for it.

I did quite a bit of research at the DigiTV forum which was very helpful. In particular there is a great how-to which explains what you need to do under Kubuntu to get it to view TV on the Nebula DigiTV card which I own.

Not wanting to pull my existing PC apart just to test this, I booted into the Kubuntu Live CD and installed the necessary drivers to the ram drive. Sure enough, without any problems at all, the Kaffeine player scanned for channels and found them just like on Windows. I even managed to record some TV direct from the live CD onto my network, just to prove I could watch it elsewhere.

Aside from the fact that I can boot Kubuntu, install drivers, tune channels and watch TV directly off a live CD without affecting my existing system, I was very impressed that it worked so painlessly. Thumbs up Linux, thumbs up Kubuntu.

Streaming TV

In reading around this area, I noticed that Kaffeine could stream TV on the network. This interested me because it would allow the tuners in one PC (near the aerial input) provide tv to other boxes around the house. Think shared music or video playback, but with live TV.

This is not just serving up the TV either, it's also providing the client application with the ability to change channels too.

I used my virtual machine installation of Kubuntu as a client and left the main DigiTV PC running Kubuntu off the live CD.

Turning on the streaming feature in Kaffeine forced me to pick a "broadcast address". By default this was 192.168.0.255. Apparently this is the broadcast address for the 192.168.0 subnet, but I would have thought a multicast address would have been better (230.x.x.x for example).

On the client, with the server broadcasting on 192.168.0.255, I could succesfully read which channels were available, but double-clicking on one brought garbled pictures in the screen area. Despite playing for a while, I couldn't get this to work properly which was a shame.

I noticed that whilst it was broadcasting, it took out my other network connections, preventing me for example from accessing the web. I changed the broadcast address to a legitimate multicast address (230.1.1.1) and that brought back my internet. Unfortunately, now the client couldn't even display a list of channels, implying it couldn't pick up the server's transmission.

Just to prove that the principle was not impossible, I set up VLC on the server and client and asked it to stream a recorded video on the 230.1.1.1 address. I was able to have multiple clients watching the stream simultaneously without any problems. Of course, I don't really need recorded video to be streamed, it's the live stuff I'm interested in. VLC can take live TV but then you can't change channel.

Close, but no cigar. At least it is definitely possible to watch and record TV under Linux from my DigiTV card. That's a start.