Alternative to cat for piping dvb output to file
 

Hi,

I am looking for an alternative to cat for streaming the output (ATSC) of a dvb card to a file. cat works fine for a bit but there is some internal variable that reaches a size limit and stops it. As evident by the c error "variable has reached size limit" (sorry for the paraphrase I do not have the error in front of me.) That is ok, a co worker who knows c told me the best thing to do is to find some other utility to do this.

cat /dev/dvb/adapter0 > test.mpg is what I am looking to replace.

Also if anybody has some tips on how to pipe this into some sort of compression utility that would be cool to.

Thanks!!

If cat works then almost any command would work and any pipe to gzip or lzip or what not to compress the ultimate file (assumes it could compress) I'd assume the issue is how often it writes to the file is the problem. Might be able to fix that.

Consider mythtv or parts of since i think it can do that with some app.



Wonder if vlc would work?

getatsc might work. It's part of the dvb-atsc-tools package:
http://www.pchdtv.com/downloads/dvb-...ools-1.0.7.tgz

Example, to dump channel 23:

dd might work. Although probably better to use a tool built for it. It could be signal strength getting low and some artifacts or something interrupts the signal. It could also be that you're writing to a filesystem that has limits. Fat32 and 4GB. Fat16 and 2GB. Ext# and a very small block size... Although the default block size for my ext# partitions allows for 1TB files.

Thanks all. your suggestions led me down the track to gnutv http://www.linuxtv.org/, that is working like a charm.