23 May
2024
23 May
'24
5:44 p.m.
On 5/22/24 11:44 PM, dep via tde-users wrote:
The Hauppauge TV tuner arrived, and while it was a
little fiddly -- and the author of the user guide makes no distinction between important
and unimportant -- I got Kaffeine running nicely, with nice, clear pictures, EPG,
everything . . . except sound. Not a peep, but an occasional crackle, which is
disconcerting.
It seems as if Kaffeine is abandonware, and there is little online about it, so I am on
my own unless someone here knows the application, or another app that can stream live
local TV via a tuner dongle.
Does anyone?
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.