[tde-users] Re: Anyone have any experience with Kaffeine?

On 5/22/24 11:44 PM, dep via tde-users wrote: Once upon a time I used Kaffeine to live stream TV. Somewhere along the way Kaffeine stopped working for me. I have memories between 0.87 and 0.88. Perhaps comparing the code between the two versions might reveal something. I just tried Kaffeine again. The software crashes with just about anything I try. The errors are related to xine-parts. If I remember correctly originally Kaffeine was designed with Xine as a backend. Xine is maintained code, but my guess is Kaffeine code needs to be updated with the latest Xine code. There is support for gstreamer, but streaming TV requires the Xine backend.

I tested Xine to verify everything functions. I have xine-lib-1.2.11 and xine-ui-0.99.13 installed. I can play audio, video, and TV channels. Xine does not have the most friendly interface so be patient. But at least I affirmed that Xine is not the issue. At this point seems we're at a dead end without digging into Kaffeine code. Since those days of Kaffeine I have been using SMPlayer to test live TV. I don't do that much because years ago I wrote my own shell script to record channels. I am not much of a TV watcher and my recordings are limited to old movies and an occasional PBC Nova show. The recordings are watched with an old version XBMC on the living room TV. But I use SMPlayer to test my TV capture cards. SMPlayer always take a long time to initialize a TV stream but otherwise works. I also use SMPlayer to watch short online videos I download with yt-dlp. SMPlayer does not scan TV channels automatically. That needs to be done separately. I use a package named dvb-apps and use the scan command. The command needs a list of the available channel frequencies, which for me is ATSC. A functional Kaffeine can scan channels and oddly, through the years I retained my ATSC scan results. Originally SMPlayer was a frontend to MPlayer but now also supports MPV. Years ago when I stopped using Kaffeine and started using SMPlayer I converted those Kaffeine channel scan files to a compatible MPlayer channels.conf file. SMPlayer reads this file and then creates its own channel list. While I can recommend SMPlayer to stream live TV, there is some frontend work required to get everything functional. Once upon a time I tried VLC, but there were various usability issues I did not like and now no longer remember. SMPlayer has always just worked for me and I never tried VLC again. I always thought Kaffeine was a handy little tool.

I'd be willing to help test patches if somebody started digging into the code.