add support for ATSC

[btmorex]

Please add support for ATSC cards.

[Wowbagger (ha87psc02)]

ATSC support should be considered very important, as this will impact anybody who is using Gnome, is in the US, and is using a TV tuner card, as pretty much all over-the-air TV transmissions in the US are ATSC now.

[Wowbagger (ha87psc02)]

NOTE TO Gnome DVB Daemon developers: here are a couple of use cases for ATSC you should keep in mind (both are real issues for me where I live):
Can we handle more than one multiplex with the same name? I have several stations that feed more than one multiplex on the stream, and all multiplexes have the same name (e.g. KCTU has 4 multiplexes all named "KCTU"). Other programs (e.g. Me-TV) cannot access all multiplexes in this case, as they expect the names to be unique.

second good use case, also valid in my area - can we handle more than one over-the-air signal with the same logical channel number and name? I can receive 2 signals for one local station, as I can "see" 2 translators for KAKE, and so have 2 physical channels mapping to logical channel 10.1).

[Sebastian Pölsterl (sebp)]

Could you please try creating a channels.conf (e.g. with dvb-apps scan) and save it as ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf

Now run "gst-launch playbin2 uri=dvb://<name>" where <name> is the name of some channel in the channels.conf. If this works gstreamer should support atsc and I can create additional patches for testing.

[Sebastian Pölsterl (sebp)]

I talked to another developer and it turned out that in order to support atsc properly work in gstreamer is required to parse tables. If you could upload sample files somewhere that would already help.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Here's the channel.conf file from my area. It has always worked well with mplayer, but gstreamer apps (such as totem) never were able to use it, it seems.

[Bastien Nocera (hadess-deactivatedaccount)]

The old Totem code had ATSC support, see:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/totem/tree/src/backend/bacon-video-widget-gst-0.10.c?h=gnome-2-28
This was the patch to add support for it:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/totem/commit/?h=gnome-2-28&id=c283e6afa7a2adb224e3d7d3833d6d628019647e

I don't know whether it did anything, Zaheer would know.

[Sebastian Pölsterl (sebp)]

That's whom I talked to. In order to get EPG for ATSC one has to write a parser.

[Wowbagger (ha87psc02)]

Re bug #4:
"If you could upload sample files somewhere that would already help."

What sort of sample files do you need? channel.conf file, raw transport layer captures,per-stream captures, ???

I'd be glad to make whatever you need available. Ideally, give me what command line you need run on an ATSC system and I'll do it.

[Sebastian Pölsterl (sebp)]

A short recording (~1 min) of a channel in MPEG TS format would be sufficient. I suppose scheduling a recording with an application that already supports atsc would work.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

Here's the smallest dump I could make with mplayer (I record using mplayer dvb://SRC-HD -cache 2000 -dumpstream -dumpfile "/tmp/foo.mpeg"). Note that it doesn't play in totem at all though, so I guess I should also file a bug in gstreamer about that.

[Joey Stanford (joey)]

It's strange that ATSC isn't supported. Many of the Haughpaugge cards like the 950Q which already work on Ubuntu are not supported in the DVBDaemon. Code for these already exist. For example ME TV works just fine.

[Joey Stanford (joey)]

after some more thought, I wonder if in fact dvb-daemon just misreads the adapter. The 950Q is powered by an XCeive chip which is a multi-protocol adapter: http://www.xceive.com/technology_XC5000.htm and it's supported in http://www.linuxtv.org/downloads/firmware/ as dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw

[Sebastian Pölsterl (sebp)]

A Linux driver is only part of the requirement. As mentioned above, GStreamer has to fully support ATSC, which it afaik currently doesn't.

[Don Smith (donsmith77)]

I'm very interested in getting this working as well as QAM support, is there anything I can do to help the developers.

[Sebastian Pölsterl (sebp)]

As mentioned above, if GStreamer fully supports ATSC, gnome-dvb-daemon can make use of it as well. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ATSC, therefore I can't test it. You can test if GStreamer has at least basic ATSC support (tuning to channel and watching it). If you encounter any problems file a bug with GStreamer (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=GStreamer)