Watching TV on your PC with TV Card and VLC
Posted 02-17-2011 at 10:02 AM by hilly
I don't know how many of you are like me and have sometimes spent hours trying to get one of the repository programs such as Kaffeine or Me-TV to work properly with your TV Card.
I came across a dead simple and very quick and dirty way of viewing Terrestial TV with my PC and my TV card using VLC the other week.
All that it entailed was the creation of a Channels.conf file which I did with w-scan which if you don't already have it installed you can do so as follows:
apt-get install w-scan (One word of note - note that the file is installed using w-scan - ie with the dash symbol whereas once it is installed you need to call the program w_scan (underscore instead of dash). I know of several people who have given up on w-scan as they could not work out why it didn't work as they were trying to run w-scan instead of w_scan.
Then if you don't know your country code (for example Australia is AU) then type w_scan -c? and you will get a full listing of Country codes.
Then if you are wanting to knock out a list for Terrestial stations simply type w_scan -cAU (or whatever your country code is) and sit back and wait 5 or 10 minutes whilst it scans and compiles the list for you.
The beauty of it all is that once you have your file you only need to run VLC if you have it installed or of course install it first (which you should as it is one very good backstop for viewing just about anything in any OS) and then run VLC and once onscreen simply Open file channels.conf. The very first time you use it there will be a delay of up to a minute whilst it compiles a configuration file but after that up will pop the tv station listings and away you go. I was absolutely amazed once I realised that I could have TV in seconds with VLC after the very first time of use.
Happy viewing - regards .... hilly registered user #462562
I came across a dead simple and very quick and dirty way of viewing Terrestial TV with my PC and my TV card using VLC the other week.
All that it entailed was the creation of a Channels.conf file which I did with w-scan which if you don't already have it installed you can do so as follows:
apt-get install w-scan (One word of note - note that the file is installed using w-scan - ie with the dash symbol whereas once it is installed you need to call the program w_scan (underscore instead of dash). I know of several people who have given up on w-scan as they could not work out why it didn't work as they were trying to run w-scan instead of w_scan.
Then if you don't know your country code (for example Australia is AU) then type w_scan -c? and you will get a full listing of Country codes.
Then if you are wanting to knock out a list for Terrestial stations simply type w_scan -cAU (or whatever your country code is) and sit back and wait 5 or 10 minutes whilst it scans and compiles the list for you.
The beauty of it all is that once you have your file you only need to run VLC if you have it installed or of course install it first (which you should as it is one very good backstop for viewing just about anything in any OS) and then run VLC and once onscreen simply Open file channels.conf. The very first time you use it there will be a delay of up to a minute whilst it compiles a configuration file but after that up will pop the tv station listings and away you go. I was absolutely amazed once I realised that I could have TV in seconds with VLC after the very first time of use.
Happy viewing - regards .... hilly registered user #462562
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Comments
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Cool. I used to do that with xawtv and suse 8.x back when tv was still analog.Posted 02-20-2011 at 12:59 PM by peonuser 
