The Problem:
I installed Kaffeine 2.0.14 in Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon and it does not display titles in the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) dialog, It lists channels only after I click on them to watch them for a few minutes and if I select "internet help for scans," it says "scan failed." I should also mention that the OSD (which I assume means onscreen display???) also does not work when I switch channels.

Background info:
I know people will suggest MythTV and Kodi as alternatives. I have never been able to get either of those programs to work on any Linux distribution and any computer. MythTV won't even setup without crashing Mint so badly that I had to reinstall (and it was virgin install to start with!) and Kodi can't find the tuner card and freezes Linux if I ask it to. I am not going to go down that rabbit hole again until they fix their software.

Getting Kaffeine to work was no walk in the park because the instructions assume you are a TV engineer. Not a single acronym is spelled out the first time it is used (a requirement in any kind of professional technical writing) and the setup procedure is so convoluted as to make it hard to understand why anyone would design an interface that way.

What I have done so far:
Since Kaffeine is a KDE product I checked there and found that no one had solved the problem. Maybe its a bug?

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=163959
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=156406

I checked this forum but all similar posts are too old.

I also checked LinuxTV Kaffeine page and found absolutely nothing useful there for a user. In fact, they assume that everybody in the world knows what the 50 acronyms on that page mean because not a single one is spelled out! Amateur writers! At any rate most of it is therefore incomprehensible.

I have a Hauppage PVR 2250 which works fine on every computer and now partially works with Kaffeine. There are no error messages in dmesg. It is running on the latest Hauppage drivers exactly as it should.

I got Kaffeine to recognize the card by watching a YouTube video and making some lucky guesses as to what all the acronyms meant. The TV picture is better than when the card was in a Windows 7 machine so kudos to the programmers!

I went to the Kaffeine page at KDE. That was one of the sparsest pages I have seen for such a difficult program. There was literally no information there for troubleshooting.

Questions:
Does anyone know how to make the EPG and OSD work on Kaffeine 2.0.14 in Mint cinnamon 19.3?

Does anyone have any suggestions for troubleshooting?

Or am I doomed to keep my Windows 7 machine forever in order to record television?

Or is there a Linux solution that is user friendly, does not require you to be a TV engineer, download a bunch of additional software that doesn't work or crash your computer?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Windows 7 WMC is still a great product. Not sure you can get OTA epg but there are plenty of grabbers and easy xmltv to import if you want. Schedules Direct and EPG123 may be the best.

Second to that would be to use Hauppage WinTV and they use TitanTV epg.

However back to your question.


It starts by us knowing a bit more about how you get your epg maybe. Might have to see if you actually get it by selecting it. Or are you making an xmltv file?

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extra...e/kaffeine.pdf has some ideas.


Linuxtv has some limited info about setup but I'd researched a bunch of epg solutions.

1 members found this post helpful.

jefro

Sorry I have not responded. I was unfamiliar with just about everything in your answer so I had to spend a lot of time reading before I could respond. I was unaware of any of those services or programs. I continued to diddle around with Linux television the last two days (its incredibly cold outside!) with no luck getting anything to work. I even downloaded and installed Kodi again and tried to get that to work to no avail. It is absolutely mind-blowing that I did a clean install using their own distribution of their software (not from Ubuntu) and the TV addons don't work, and throw errors inside Kodi. Everything I tried to do in Kodi caused an error!! It is no different then when I installed it using the Ubuntu repository.

Anyway I give up. I just want to record television so I can watch it when I have time (which isn't often). I will just buy a DVR that doesn't depend on Microsoft and be done with it. I don't need a TV card in my computer if I just want to watch because my monitor is a television.

Thank you for your advice and taking the time to help me. By the way how is Ellie May and Granny?? :-))

A few month ago, I bought a Hauppauge WinTV. I tried to run it under kaffeine firstly, but the automatic search never found one single station (I believe that the search in kaffeine is unfinished work which has no particular function). In the end, the only station scanner I found which does work is

https://github.com/mighty-p/t2scan/releases

t2scan -t2 -o vlc > t2scan.xspf

should scan and find the stations in your area and write them to t2scan.xspf, which can be imported directly into vlc (could be that you might have to fumble with the switch -t2, I don't recall what it is).

HTH


EDIT: stupid me.

1 members found this post helpful.

Marius162

Your level of skill and knowledge is much higher than mine! I wish I had not removed the winTV card now because this sounds very interesting. I had no idea that VLC could display television.

Unfortunately the card broke as I was removing the antenna coaxial. The stud for the coaxial was just spinning and I could not get the coaxial off so I had to remove the card entirely and take it into my shop to try to get the coaxial off or I can just throw the whole thing away (probably what I will do since I will never be able to use that input stud again and the card probably won't work now anyway). Fortunately the card was very inexpensive and is very old (but digital not analog).

Thank you for the information. But I am convinced that TV on Linux requires a very high level of technical expertise and beyond the reach of someone like me who only uses his computer as a tool to do real work and expects software to do everything software can do and not require the user to jump through hoops. Kaffeine did eventually work (except for the EPG) but only after hours of reading and trying things based on an imperfect understanding of the jargon and really very bad writing in the manual.

At work, I have sometimes been in charge of software development and I have always instructed the programmers that no matter how many lines of code it took, every unnecessary keystroke for an employee was to be removed. The programmer fought like banshees because what I asked them to do was hard and "users should know how to this or that" and "it wasn't necessary to write that code." My concern was management and their concern was making their lives easier.

If you think about it, with our 15,000 employees, one extra keystroke every day for all these people more than made up for the extra cost of programming. My philosophy even in my private life is that if software doesn't work out of the box and I have to tweak, tweak, tweak, then I need to find another way to do the job. So that's what I am doing with TV recording. By the way, the people who had to use my software raved about it!

I found it somewhat easy to install tvheadend using actual software from https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvhea...ptRepositories It looked well enough to use locally as well as serving to lan. Comes with recording and found epg automatically and has basic player for live and maybe recorded.

Using some of the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint built in software managers might give you a new type of program and it may fail to act like the real installed.

You may also have an ability to use jellyfin. Mythtv I think still uses tvheadend as engine.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Jefro. If I ever put another TV card in my Linux computer I will try that. However for now I will be using a stand alone DVR to record television. If it stops working then I might go back to the Linux computer.

I am simply not willing to waste anymore time trying to get Linux software to work. Its not just the TV but just about 50% of the software on this Linux machine has problems. Just getting the printer to print PDF files took 8 hours of trial and error. Its not the printer. It works perfectly with every other computer and device.

With a few exceptions like Mint 9 Gloria and the last version of Mint before 19, Linux had always been a time consuming struggle for me. While I do not want Microsoft in my house, nor Google, Apple, Amazon, or any of the others, Linux is starting to look less and less viable. If I keep having to spend this much time tinkering with my computer then I will starve and end up homeless!!

I might switch distributions. Maybe if I go directly with Ubuntu, everything will work out of the box. My Linux knowledge has progressed where I think I can get rid of the training wheels (Mint) and wear the long pants now!

PS Could you please delete my last post (#6)? Deleting doesn't seem to be an option for me. I wrote a post about how wonderful this company was because they provided Linux software, but it turned out it did not have a TV tuner, it just captured. I deleted all the words but can't delete the post.

Sure.

What did you end up doing?

Jefro:

Thanks for deleting the post.

I bought a ChannelMaster Stream. Solves the problem and I will never need to spend another minute diddling with the computer to get a TV card to work. Now if Canon would just write some Linux software fo0r their document scanners I could make my office a Microsoft-free work place. Its the very last thing I need the Windows 7 machine for.

The document scanner works in Linux but the software is so cumbersome and poorly designed that it takes 10 times as long to use. I would really, really miss the magical software from Canon that automagically straightens the page, turns it right side up, puts the pages in the correct order, removes any scanner artifacts, makes my coffee for me and has an interface that allows me to save a new document with only three keystrokes. Brother CLAIMS that they have Linux software for theirs but after talking to their technical support, that turns out to be a lie. They have a DRIVER and that's it. The Chinese government has their own Linux distribution and maybe a Chinese document scanner has Linux software. I am not highly motivated to research it as long as the Windows machine keeps working.

Thanks for the solution. I considered that product a few times.

I have installed some windows apps in linux using wine. Not sure how much you want to play with that but if so maybe make a new thread on the subject. Others may have a solution. Maybe a different scanner program. I assume you are using sane.

1 members found this post helpful.

Jefro:

I can recommend the Channelmaster. I have always found their products to simply work out of the box every time in the manner advertised. My entire system from the antenna to the distribution amplifiers is Channelmaster and I have tried Wineguard and others that have been very unsatisfactory in my fringe area. The only down side is that if you want more than 1 day's EPG (obtained automatically from the ATSC channels) you will need a Google account and of course that's never going to happen for me because Google is about as evil as a company can be. But its really not needed and Channelmaster doesn't make you get an account. However the internal EPG software is programmed for Google (or ATSC) so you are not going to be able to generate an xmltv file on your computer and install it in the box. Kudos to Channelmaster for being upfront and honest about that. Also the EPG does not work for all 75 channels I receive, but for me it doesn't matter because ever since the Big Bang show went away, the only shows we want to record are on PBS and that works fine in this area. I don't think you will go wrong with Channelmaster. If you have plenty of cash, and want 2 weeks EPG then Tivo is your best bet. It doesn't require you to have an account with any of the evil companies. You just need a Tivo account for 7 dollars a month and they swear they do not sell your information.

As far as the scanner yes I used sane and have tried every Linux scanning program available and can say categorically that they are all terribly inefficient. Any business using them that has to scan a lot of documents would go broke. I tried wine and I tried a Windows 7 virtual machine because I have plenty of licenses for that, that I am not using. I could probably get it to work if I spent another 80 hours on forums and trial and error. Wine was completely hopeless. Just following the Virtual Box instructions, while USB sticks and cameras are recognized without issue, the scanner software cannot find the scanner. So as long as the Windows 7 machine continues to function I am unwilling to spend the time trying to get Linux software to work as advertised. I am a casual Windows expert (simply because of the 20-30 years using it and DOS). At work, I am the guy everybody goes to. If I can't get it to work in 10 minutes then only a serious Guru is going to be able to fix it.

The weather is getting better and I would rather go fishing and hiking!! Signing off this thread. Thanks for all your help Jefro. You are first rate!!