Using VLC to play analog tv card

One of the things that I like about knoppix is that it includes tvtime. If you've got a standard analog tv card (bt848 based) it should work out of the box.

Sure, analog TV is a dinosaur, but I can still get analog cable TV from the digital-analog converters from the cable company.

All you have to do is to tune channel 3 on the analog and use the remote for the converter box.


I recently figured out that VLC will also play the TV card quite well, just point it to /dev/video0 or /dev/video1 (or whichever /dev/video is the proper number) and it works quite well.

One of the problems is that VLC doesn't seem to have any support for changing the channels on the tuner. TVtime has this built-in.

(Not that you really need to change the channel, but I wanted to know how to do it).


"v4l2-ctl --help-tuner" gives you
Tuner/Modulator options:
-F, --get-freq query the frequency [VIDIOC_G_FREQUENCY]
-f, --set-freq=
set the frequency to MHz [VIDIOC_S_FREQUENCY]
-T, --get-tuner query the tuner settings [VIDIOC_G_TUNER]
-t, --set-tuner=
set the audio mode of the tuner [VIDIOC_S_TUNER]
Possible values: mono, stereo, lang2, lang1, bilingual
--tuner-index= Use idx as tuner idx for tuner/modulator commands
--list-freq-bands display all frequency bands for the tuner/modulator
[VIDIOC_ENUM_FREQ_BANDS]
--get-modulator query the modulator settings [VIDIOC_G_MODULATOR]


You can use "v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -f 61.25" from the command line to set the frequency to change the channel to 3.
You can use "v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -f 67.25" from the command line to set the frequency to change the channel to 4.

http://osdir.com/ml/video4linux-list/2009-06/msg00098.html


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_television_frequencies

Also make sure that you show the "additional options" in the play capture card dialog and set the caching to 0ms, otherwise your audio will be out of sync since it will wait for the caching delay before it shows the video.