Can someone lend me a DVB-T USB receiver?
I’m looking into building a home-made, cobbled together TV recording thing for various people in the house who watch TV (I do, a little bit). I really need some help on this because it involves me sucking at hardware and me sucking at anything related to televisions.
What I’ve got: a Linux machine. Not a very powerful one, mind, but it should be able to take a DVB-T stream and encode it as H.264 or whatever the current ‘shunting-it-around-the-network-and-watching-it-on-PCs-and-gadgets’ format of the week is. I’ve also got a big aerial on the roof which we used to use to pick up analogue terrestrial broadcasts. Actually, we still do. But we live in a shit area for TV, so we get Freesat instead.
Why not decode DVB-S then? Because it’s complex and expensive. I’ve looked into it. I’d have to faff around with laying more coaxial cable. And the USB gadget you plug into your PC can only be bought from some dodgy bloke in Germany who you have to send a hundred euros to over PayPal or something. It is basically a load of faff: expensive, complicated and not frankly worth it. Freesat has more channels, but I don’t actually care about all those channels. I basically want to record stuff off the mainstream terrestrial channels and the extra digital channels provided by the mainstream broadcasters (ITV2, ITV3, BBC Four, E4 etc.) - lack of access to The Wedding Channel or The Horse Channel or whatever aren’t a great loss to my DVB recording setup.
So, I want to start with DVB-T. But I don’t know what to buy. I don’t want to spend much money, because, you know, it’s a hack and I’m lazy and cheap. There are lots of DVB-T receivers: I’m okay with a PCI card or a USB thing (or even a FireWire thing if they do that). It must be able to hook up to my existing aerial - you know, the old school analogue aerial thing. A USB one that I could also plug into my Mac laptop (or Linux netbook) and use when not at home would be nice, but the primary use is in my Linux PC. Dual-channel would be awesome.
Do any of the people I know IRL who read this have one I could borrow for a few days? Or could you recommend me one I could buy from a retailer who will give me a 100% full no-questions-asked refund if it all doesn’t work? I’m not willing to spend more than about twenty quid on this if it has the very real potential of not working (again, this is purely geographical - I’m not actually sure whether I get DVB-T signals).
The other question is one of software. My requirements are simple: I want to be able to very occasionally watch live streams, and play live audio streams. I also want to be able to record the streams. Ideally, I want to do this on my headless Linux server, but be able to access the stream from my laptop. A web-based or command line scheduling system would be useful. I’m not interested in some kind of ‘media center’ experience - I’m interested in automating all that crap away! Something lightweight and command-line driven would be nice, as I could then build something like a little web interface to it using Sinatra. I want to be able to put permissions and priorities and stuff on that, but that’s my prerogative once I’ve got the simpler stuff working. If I’ve got the thing plugged straight into my Mac, then obviously some desktop software might be useful. But that’s the exception: generally, I’ll be using it on a headless server to record files according to a schedule.
Someone has a way of removing commercials, right? I run Adblock in my browser. Just completely filtering adverts from the TV stream seems like a worthwhile use of CPU cycles. Do they send some bits in the stream when commercials are on, or is there an algorithm for automatically detecting noisy assholish promotion of Shit I Don’t Need? Alternatively, couldn’t we have a way of sharing ad timings: basically, imagine an XML file you could download which would tell you the best estimate of the community (yes, that one, you know, the people who care about shit like this) as to when the ads are, so the computer can just drop those bytes from capture? One thread I saw suggested that you just need to look for three or more consecutive black frames, but notes that it won’t work when channels have identifiers (the dreaded Digital Onscreen Graphics that all right-thinking people loath but which TV broadcasters insert just to ruthlessly pursue their micro-segmented audience niche of the sort of fucking idiotic celebrity-adoring shitwits to whom this video - and, in fact, a large swathe of both BBC Three and Radio 1 - is targeted).
Basically, my question boils down to: is television something that is still only suitable for normal people or has someone made it possible to use for an automation-requiring Unix neckbeard to actually use in a sane way? I can control most everything else that’s important over SSH. What about television?
