First paragraph: everyone should stop shoulding everyone else. Shoulding = incipient flaming.

Second paragraph: now see, you're argument for using windows is my argument for not using windows. The problem that we have today is that the hardware manufacturers have but one operating system in mind. There are many things I can't do simply because the manufacturer didn't think anybody would be using a different operating system. But how inbred and crazy is that? Let's say that in a year Windows Vista comes out, and it's the biggest hunk of trash anyone's ever used. It makes DOS look flexible and userfriendly and is universally accepted as trash. But all of the programmers for all of the manufacturers only know what Microsoft tells them, because that's all they've ever known. The companies now have a hard line of sticking with MS even when things go horribly bad.
I want OSX drivers for every piece of hardware. I've never used OSX in my life, but I want them to exist. It benefits me because it promotes diversity and new ways of thinking and approaching a problem. As a programmer yourself, this is in your best interest. More support = more programmers = a wider audience. Even though the manufacturer is the least benefactor, everyone wins to a certain extent (other than microsoft, who can no longer monopolize the industry.)
I'm not part of this crazy cult. I don't know jack about linux, which is why I'm here. But I recognize that it is in my best interest and the best interest of the entire community for me to learn to use linux, that way if it just so happens to be better I will have the bilinguality to make use of it. Today, tomorrow, next year, or in ten years. We simply mustn't become entrenched.

Ok *steps down from soap box*

[QUOTE]Originally posted by angkor
You show very little respect for the gnu developers working on many apps in their spare time for a 50+ man who's been a software developer for most of his life....


I dont respect rapists and they rarely charge for their services. Just because something is free does not automatically make it good and therefor deserving of respect. I think people should forget money - its not the issue. I do not respect open source developers who write bad and buggy software. Not in the slightest. I respect the ones that do a good job (most).

I do have enormous respect for those developers who have beavered away long hours to develop the DVB drivers and the API. So its all the more dismaying to have all that work wasted simply for the sake of a couple of lines of script necessary to invoke it and start it working. I think the lack of support for all their hard work in the distros is what really shows a lack of respect for their hard work.


You didnt buy Ubuntu now did you...? If someone gave you a DVD player and it didnt work would you expect that person to fix it for you?

Again this issue of money.

If I won a brand new DVD player in a shop competition (e.g. got it for free) I would take it back if it did not work. A second hand DVD given to me by a friend would be a different issue, but then software is not second hand and does not wear out. So your comparison is really not completely valid.

You seem also to show little respect for these unpaid heroes of yours, implying that since they work for nothing you cannot expect the software to work, e.g. it is obviously going to be broken like the DVD player. My experience is that unpaid open source developers mostly make software that works very well.

I respect the right of anyone to write crap software that does not work if they want to, but I respect my own right not to have to respect that crap software.

Either these open source developers do a good job or they do not. Which is it? Let me know when you have decided.


Anyhow, it strikes me as very odd that you've been developing software longer than I'm alive and it takes you "hours searching and debugging" just to get multimedia to work on any distro.

Good luck.

First I never said that - you have not read the post properly. Since you are not paid to read the post I guess I cannot complain.

I have never got DVB working on any distro so I have no idea how much time and effort it would take. I have no intention wasting my time trying to do it. I am not an open source developer. Are you?

And none of my 50 years of software development experience was in multimedia. For one thing its a recent development. They had no DVD's thirty years ago. IT is a vast field and my experience was in business applications and on Windows not Linux. So I know bugger all about multimedia in Linux. Zilch.

:newbie:

I am not such a great believer in variety as you are. I think it makes much more sense to have a single universal operating system. It is very costly and inneficient for a manufacturer to have to develop, test and support multiple drivers for many different operating systems. It is also more difficult for users to share data amongst themselves across different and incompatible systems, and also to have to learn how to use multiple systems.

Remember the VHS / Betamax situation where every video store had to stock two version of every movie, one for Beta and one for VHS? Not good.

I appreciate the ethics of having freedom to choose, and having different things to choose from. I also hate Windows because it is crap and because Microsoft deliberately keep it as crap so that they can keep selling new versions. In other words they have a stranglehold on the market and are milking it for every dollar they can get.

I think the open source solution is the best since it is driven more by logic than by profit, and delivers more of what people actually want.

@ptay

This has absolutely nothing to do with the topic, so I'm sorry for that in advance. I just wanted to say that you've got an amazing sense of humor, and I've had entirely too much fun reading your posts and laughing out loud. :) Sadly, this topic has worn thin and it's pretty much a flame war now. I'll have to say that you weren't the first one to draw blood. Your initial topic and first couple of responses didn't have anything that should justify the initial jabs that people made at you, but I don't think any of them are going to give up now. Random people are going to read the first couple posts and then write up some half thought out garbage to toss (isn't that always the way with flame wars). Then you'll have people on *your side* doing the same thing, reading the first couple posts and rushing to defend you with some more half thought out garbage. Best to just not respond anymore.

Haha, anyway I was going to make a list of quotes that I laughed at the most, but there were just too many. :) Wait, on second thought I've got to throw this one in:

LOL. Funny at so many levels. :D

The only thing that I can think of to help your problem is to get a good package manager. In my opinion the best are rpmdrake (Mandriva) and Synaptic (Mepis and Ubuntu are good examples, but anything that uses apt-get can use Synaptic). The problem that you'll have is you still need to add non-standard package sources to get most of the codecs you'll need. With rpmdrake, it's easy to do at easyurpmi, for Synaptic I'd have to check which repository it is that has most of this stuff (I'm typing this from a Windows computer at the moment). If you'd like me to do that for you, I'd be perfectly happy to, or else someone might remember off the top of their head. I actually DON'T know how to find this stuff for Ubuntu because I don't use Ubuntu much and you aren't supposed to use the standard debian repositories for it... you want to talk about something ANNOYING for standards, how about Ubuntu breaking away from the debian packages so that now it has its own. Now there are two .deb versions of everything, just like betamax/vhs, and Ubuntu has so many users now it's almost an even split between Ubuntu and the rest of the debian distros.

Anyway, it has to work this way because if someone were to package these non-free codecs with their products without the proper license they could be sued. No one really wants to take that chance. I understand that whole annoyance with programs not being initialized though. Like whenever I tried to get the default burning program to work in FC2. It had to be initialized with all this permissions crap (how hard would it have been to just put this into a script that runs automatically) and then it didn't automatically detect any of the drives, so I was going to have to input that stuff into config files manually. HEADACHE. So I installed k3b which just works *please don't flame me everyone, :( I admit I did the "easy" thing and just installed something that would work instead of spending a couple hours trying to make some other program work*.

Don't think I can help you with DVB. I'll have to admit that I don't even know what that stands for. :s

That's exactly it! That fight between beta and VHS is the perfect analogy. Because beta was better. It had higher resolution and better fidelity (from what I've been told, those things came and went before I was old enough to operate electronics) and beta still lost because of VHS's superior marketing. Those who knew better faught, and in some small pockets continue to fight for betta. What I'm saying is, wouldn't it have been better if instead of being defeated the community had banded together and faught back? At a time when they could have made a difference, what if those experts who knew what they were doing and talking about had come out strongly in favor of betta? Maybe superior marketing still would have won, but would and should are different. We should fight for our right to choose a better operating system by taking part in it and refusing to give MS our business.
wow... I didn't really know I cared that much about all of this... ^_^

Ah, but you're forgetting that VHS usually let you record for a longer amount of time. Just because something is better in one way, you can't assume that it is better in all ways. Sometimes one thing that is better to one person is not better to another.

It stands for Digital Video Broadcast and is the European (and now Australian) digital TV broadcast standard. There are more than three versions, DVB-S for satellite, DVB-T for terrestrial (e.g. via standard antennas), and now I think DVB-H for cell phones.

There is an equivalent American NTSC standard for digital broadcast.

My issue with DVB and Linux is not related to codecs (DVB uses MPEG-2 by the way) or to installation of applications (which are usually installed by default, e.g. xine, mplayer, kaffeine, tvtime, etc) but with the software actually detecting the presence of the device (e.g. the driver).

Thanks anyway.

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

Unfortunately most members of the public are not interested enough in nor educated enough about technology to care much about the relative merits. They are more likely to pick a product by its price or colour. If consumers were better educated and more interested in quality there would not be so much crap being sold.

For example within the writeable DVD field there are three main contenders, DVD-RAM (the first), DVD minus (second) and DVD plus (third). Of these DVD-RAM is easily far superior but almost ignored and dying. IT can be rewritten over 100,000 times compared to 1000 times with the other two. It originally came in a protective cartridge which stopped the disc getting damaged. It has built in error correction, etc.etc. Of the second two Plus is the best but may only have equal share or perhaps slightly less in the market place.

It reminds me of the phrase someone used about Intel - first with the worst.

About BetaMax and VHS, I recently read a different take on the subject.

Sony would not licence BetaMax freely, they wanted a lock on the market. VHS was licensable. Hence VHS won.

For starters, I can't figure out what the chipset of your Nebula card is, so I haven't been able to look for drivers for it. Second, it looks like you're going to want to try the rivatv package which is the project that is trying to get video in to work for nvidia cards. There is I believe a debian package for this and I believe a gentoo port as well. If it works, it works, but I haven't tried it. Getting DVDs to work requires installing the libdvdcss package. That's fairly universal across all distros. This will almost never be in a standard package repository as it's full of licensing issues. Usually you'll have to add an unofficial repository. There is kdetv as well, but once again this is just a frontend (though probably a good one since it's a kde app), and it's not going to work without drivers. The problem with drivers in Linux for a lot of hardware is they go by chipset rather than brand and model. If you can figure out the chipset for your nebula card, there might be something for it.

Playing DVD's first. Never had a problem with the libdvdcss package - easy to get and install. Usually DVD playback either does work out of the box (rare) or i get some message about not being able to find the /dev/dvd device, or something even more cryptic. It seems to be a golden rule that when building a new distribution, one must move everything to new locations so that no one knows where to find them. One simple way of satisfying this requirement is to map the DVD drive to lots of different symbolic names (e.g. /dev/hdc, /dev/sd1a, etc). Not that it matters where it is put - just so long as it is not where anyone else has put it on any other distros.

I have now got used to going in to the config screen for the package (e.g. xine) and telling it where to find the DVD drive. Of course this is not a nice solution. For one thing there is only ONE box for the drive address whearas I have TWO drives. Secondly the drive mapping is different for each distro and often each version of a distro, and one has to LOOK for it, and I never know where to look (that also can vary from distro to distro). Lastly could'nt the software scan for the drives and locate them automatically? It s hardly rocket science.

Jokes apart, one of the problems is perhaps that my PC has TWO dvd drives but most software seems to assume you would only have one (e.g. /dev/dvd). Maybe this is why I never get the /dev/dvd mapping - perhaps the software tries to map the same symbolic link to two drives and fails. If so this is a pretty stupid assumption to make. If a computer can have multiple drives, then the software should be designed to cope.

My Nebula device is not a PCI card but external USB2. It has a NXT6000 tuner (I think). Anyhow the details should be available if you Google - the manufacturers website is http://www.nebula-electronics.com. Anyhow drivers exist for this and should be built into the 2.6.11 (or later) kernels. I am sure that both distros I use have the driver, as the "active" led on the front of the DigiTV device lights up when they are booted up. It never used to on the older kernels. Also, when I first booted up the PCLinuxOS live cd and ran Kaffeine, the icon on the Kaffeine screen which represents DVB was not greyed out, and the DVB tab appeared allowing me to select DVB functions. When I tried to tune the TV channels the software hung. Subsequently I installed PCLinuxOS on the hard drive, and now Kaffeine has the DVB icon greyed out. This suggests that maybe a different kernel has been installed or the loadable kernel module driver for the device has not been copied.


The RivaTV is another issue. I have never been able to get that to work either. Complains about there being no /dev/video0 device and refuses to load. I have sent several emails to the RivaTV website but to no avail. From what I can see on the web it would appear that the author is probably the only user.

Its the same old story again and again with Linux. So near and yet so far. All this hard work has been done, and then spoiled at the last moment by a series of minor yet significant ommisions.

What we need is someone to put together a distro that has an interest in making it ALL work and knows how to pay attention to the details. It also needs for the Linux community to standardise on where they put script files, etc.

Definitely true in some way, but I don't know if it's the software or the distro?
I have one CD, one internal DVD and one external DVD. Mepis/Debian never plays a DVD-video. But LormaLinux(based on FedoraCore3) and Mandriva 2005/2006 has no problem - same software. I do guess it is a configuration-issue, some distros help with that some don't.

Now if you are right in that the DVB-card is supported, and this is not a driver-problem, just a few thoughts:
As I understand you, you have a decent internet-connection. This is my opinion concerning differences between distro-families:
Debian has the best repos, and the packaging-system that works best. But Debian doesn't help you with the hardware, you will need to do a lot of manual configuration.
"Fedora" -style: yum is pretty good, but the gui's are'nt close to synaptic. It still is a bit painful to search for and install software. Apt-4-rpm with Synaptic is better, but it's pretty difficult to get the mirrors you want working, often MD5-problems and there are conflicts between repos.
Urpmi - Mandriva: A very good distro, but has had a few problems. It is easy to use synaptic/apt with urpmi-repos and the repos are pretty large. But! Their repos are not well maintained - packages don't exist or are corrupted/ can't be downloaded.

Conclusion?
1. Stay clear of Debian! If you want your hardware to simply work.
2. FC4 could be - only you'll have to add multimedia-support manually (chicken... :) )
3. Mandriva 2006: yes - but install as much as possible when installing the distro!
If you only need standard-workstation plus a few video-apps, Mandriva2006 is the one that really just worked for me. (No DVB though, only analog TV).
And then of course there are all those variants that you're not so happy about...
...but you want another one to be made, right? :p
One that is special made for multimedia - that is, one that suits your needs...
Actually, that is a good idea - I'm not really critisising you!
I mentioned a distro I saw some year ago, the name is StartCom
I never got to try it, it was something wrong with my CD's. Maybe you check it out?
Oh, I almost forgot: LormaLinux is FC3 with multimedia-support, that one worked well for me.

And finally, don't give up! I know, been there. (Though I must say I have had more trouble with Windows and hardware than with Linux and hardware.)
But once you get it to work, you have so many tools available! And that is what I really love most with Llinux - there's a tool for everything, if one doesn't work - try some other!

------
P.S How the h... do you spell "critiscziscze"?

Reduce the s and z counts and you'll be closer :D

Thanks for the help.

See next post for additional info re the problem.

permissions
 

Followed the advice on another forum thread re a different issue, and started Kaffeine from a terminal. This showed the error message "permission denied" when trying to access the /dev/dvb0 info. This is the hoary old root user issue, whereby so much software requires you to be either a root user or to set special permissions on the files and directories.

Anyhow, running as root user now allows Kaffeine to activate its DVB tag as it did formerly when I ran PCLinuxOS from the live-cd (which must automatically run as root - its all clear now).

However, that does not mean it actually works. Any attempt to autotune or manually tune and then play results in Kaffeine hanging.

Where would we be without computers eh?

Heres a nice philosphical question.

Why is it that computers, which are designed to automate processes, often cannot automate the installation and setup of the processes themselves?

p.s. I do know the answer.

:Pengy: :study: :mad: :o