I'm glad Bill is happy with no TV. I would not be.
To wit: https://ofb.biz/safari/article/1203.html
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?
dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
On Wednesday 22 May 2024 21:44:56 dep via tde-users wrote:
I'm glad Bill is happy with no TV. I would not be.
My compensation is that I listen to far more music, almost endlessly ... almost every waking moment.
One has to make a choice. I can't do both at the same time.
Bill
On 2024-05-22 23:44:56 dep via tde-users wrote:
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?
dep
Kaffeine worked well for me since KDE3 days until sometime around the release of Trinity R14, when various parts became broken. Now it crashes immediately when I try to play anything with either the gstreamer or xine engines. I'm not sure which of the multimedia players are actually supported in Trinity; there are nine others besides Kaffeine in the menu: Amarok Codeine Kaboodle KMPlayer KPlayer Noatune VLC TDEMid JuK
I was very well used to Kaffein's controls; I find that VLC is more difficult to operate. I have not tried many of the others, but I suppose I will have to explore them.
Leslie -- Platform: Linux Distribution: openSUSE Leap 15.5 - x86_64 Desktop Environment: Trinity Qt: 3.5.0 TDE: R14.1.2 tde-config: 1.0
Anno domini 2024 Thu, 23 May 04:18:53 -0500 J Leslie Turriff via tde-users scripsit:
On 2024-05-22 23:44:56 dep via tde-users wrote:
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?
dep
Kaffeine worked well for me since KDE3 days until sometime around the release of Trinity R14, when various parts became broken. Now it crashes immediately when I try to play anything with either the gstreamer or xine engines. I'm not sure which of the multimedia players are actually supported in Trinity; there are nine others besides Kaffeine in the menu: Amarok Codeine Kaboodle KMPlayer KPlayer Noatune VLC TDEMid JuK
I was very well used to Kaffein's controls; I find that VLC is more difficult to operate. I have not tried many of the others, but I suppose I will have to explore them.
IMO the last really good player for music was XMMS and XINE for video. Both have passed away (XMMS2 is a PITA, VLC is working when stripped to bare minimum). But it seams stretched to install a FreeBSD VM to use XMMS :)
Kaffeinw works on my system (devuan ceres), but you might need to tweak the order of audio devices.
Nik
Leslie
Platform: Linux Distribution: openSUSE Leap 15.5 - x86_64 Desktop Environment: Trinity Qt: 3.5.0 TDE: R14.1.2 tde-config: 1.0 ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskto...
-- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...
On Thursday 23 May 2024 04:33:47 Thierry de Coulon via tde-users wrote:
On Thursday 23 May 2024 11.34:22 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote:
IMO the last really good player for music was XMM
I find Qmmp is not so bad, only the interface is quite small.
I double-size my interface with both qmmp and audacious; I use the old Winamp skins (and really only the ones that actually look like the original Winamp).
If I recall, there is some default setting for audacious that is ugly, user-unfriendly, and I never use it. But I set it for the old Winamp appearance, use my old skins, set it for double-size, and everything works fine on both. I use audacious for playing music from files on my own machine, and qmmp I use for streaming radio from the internet.
Bill
On Thursday 23 May 2024 02:34:22 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote:
IMO the last really good player for music was XMMS and XINE for video. Both have passed away (XMMS2 is a PITA, VLC is working when stripped to bare minimum). But it seams stretched to install a FreeBSD VM to use XMMS :)
Kaffeinw works on my system (devuan ceres), but you might need to tweak the order of audio devices.
Nik
There are still some legacy xmms packages that I discovered online, and actually, that old xmms still works great.
I would be worried about security for online use. Also, as I recall, whenever I tried to install new packages, I would be forced to uninstall xmms, then if I wanted to keep using it, to reinstall with dpkg.
This seemed rather pointless, to go through that endless loop of installation
uninstallation > reinstallation of the same packages, just to be able to
use a legacy media player. Besides, audacious, once I got used to it, and customized to my own tastes, has worked very well.
However, if there happens to be anybody out there who wishes to try out the old xmms again (just because), here are some links:
http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210429053638/http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmm...
https://visihow.com/Install_XMMS_on_Ubuntu_10.04 https://web.archive.org/web/20210411123226/https://visihow.com/Install_XMMS_...
http://www.xmms.org/download.php https://web.archive.org/web/20211124050240/http://www.xmms.org/download.php
Archived pages included, just in case of dead links.
Also, of course, xmms could be install from source packages, in which case, it wouldn't get uninstalled by apt or aptitude.
Bill
On Thursday 23 May 2024 02:18:53 J Leslie Turriff via tde-users wrote:
On 2024-05-22 23:44:56 dep via tde-users wrote:
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?
dep
Kaffeine worked well for me since KDE3 days until sometime around the release of Trinity R14, when various parts became broken. Now it crashes immediately when I try to play anything with either the gstreamer or xine engines. I'm not sure which of the multimedia players are actually supported in Trinity; there are nine others besides Kaffeine in the menu: Amarok Codeine Kaboodle KMPlayer KPlayer Noatune VLC TDEMid JuK
I was very well used to Kaffein's controls; I find that VLC is more difficult to operate. I have not tried many of the others, but I suppose I will have to explore them.
Leslie
I believe that VLC would be your best shot for streaming live TV via a dongle. I don't do it myself, but I have heard from others over the past few years.
For video players, once I found smplayer, I never used anything else. And then, for unknown reasons, my sound stopped working with smplayer. I have wasted hours and hours trying to get the sound to work again, dug out old configuration files and previous installations from backups of old systems, etc. ... but nothing works.
So I returned to VLC, which is reliable, though more difficult to use. Also, the sound in VLC is tinny and shrill, and I cannot seem to make it better, whereas in smplayer it was just right. I have custom EQ settings saved from years past, but these don't seem to help.
In any case, it doesn't bother me too much any more. It would be nice to get the sound working right on both VLC and smplayer, because I sometimes might feel like watching, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to get it to work.
Sound is fine with all my audio players.
Bill
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.
On 2024-05-23 12:44:43 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
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.
When I try to use it to listen to audio with Xine it crashes; with gstreamer is complains that it can't find it.
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.
More friendly than any of the others I've tried, for sure.
I'd be willing to help test patches if somebody started digging into the code.
Leslie -- Platform: Linux Distribution: openSUSE Leap 15.5 - x86_64 Desktop Environment: Trinity Qt: 3.5.0 TDE: R14.1.2 tde-config: 1.0
On 5/23/24 6:33 PM, J Leslie Turriff via tde-users wrote:
When I try to use it to listen to audio with Xine it crashes; with gstreamer is complains that it can't find it.
Looks like a reasonable place to start troubleshooting. Xine functions here for me. I'm on Slackware 15.0 but can't vouch about other distros.
dep via tde-users wrote:
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?
This is why I ported kplayer (not to be mistaken with kmplayer). I used kplayer with USB-T/C receiver ~15y ago. I suspect it would work the same as back then. If you try it, let me know, if we can improve something. I recall I had to generate a list with channels and save it somewhere in the config directories, so that mplayer can display the list with the (DVB) stations. It still does.
-
Darrell Anderson -
deloptes -
dep -
Dr. Nikolaus Klepp -
J Leslie Turriff -
Thierry de Coulon -
William Morder