I thought I would write a program so I spent a few hours the other day reading up on tclTk as I have never programmed with it before.
Anyway, I decided to write a simple front end to mplayer to allow the changing of dvb tv channels through a GUI. I have christened it the 'Puppy DVB Viewer'.
As I have no experience with this programming language I am not sure if you will need devx to use this program (if anyone can let me know how to package it up so anybody can use it I would be grateful.)
The resulting program is attatched (quite nervous about posting this). I have done two versions, the attached one opens an mplayer window for viewing, the other plays within the GUI window but I have not posted this as I am not happy with the window layout yet.
This is most certainly an alpha! There is no error checking to speak of and you occasionally have to press the button twice to get the selected channel (I think when some previous mplayer is taking too long to be killed) but for all the roughness, I am finding it quite useful. I intend to polish it up a bit and at a later date add things like a full screen button, volume control and a recording facility. Perhaps I might give a choice of mplayer or gxine as frontends.
I have been using it successfully with DVB-T but I think it should work ok with DVB-C & DVB-S (I think that the channels.conf is the same format).
To use the program you have to have Mplayer installed and a valid channels.conf in /root/.mplayer/
I would be very happy to receive any feedback/constructive critisism, I hope that someone else might find this useful too.
EDIT I should just add that I have not yet put a scrollbar in the channel list, you can however scroll through channels with your mouse scrollwheel
Gary
Puppy DVB Viewer
Puppy DVB Viewer
- Attachments
-
- PDValpha.tar.gz
- Puppy DVB Viewer ALPHA
- (945 Bytes) Downloaded 336 times
Hi Sintot
Thanks for your comments.
This is mainly a programming exercise but as I have problems with gxine it is useful for me anyway.
I know it is very rough at the moment but I have only spent a few hours on it, eventually I hope to add all the functionality that I had in my windows installation before I swapped to linux and be able to toggle between windowed and unwindowed mode.
At the moment unless you go for an involved setup like myth then it is difficult to get a program that will allow you to do everything including scheduled recording. I hope to be able to implement this as time allows.
Of course the icing on the cake would be getting an electronic program guide working as well.
Interesting that you had it running without devx, I thought it would not be needed but tried the program on another computer here (without devx) and it didn't run, guess that is something I will have to look at.
Thanks for your comments.
This is mainly a programming exercise but as I have problems with gxine it is useful for me anyway.
I know it is very rough at the moment but I have only spent a few hours on it, eventually I hope to add all the functionality that I had in my windows installation before I swapped to linux and be able to toggle between windowed and unwindowed mode.
At the moment unless you go for an involved setup like myth then it is difficult to get a program that will allow you to do everything including scheduled recording. I hope to be able to implement this as time allows.
Of course the icing on the cake would be getting an electronic program guide working as well.
Interesting that you had it running without devx, I thought it would not be needed but tried the program on another computer here (without devx) and it didn't run, guess that is something I will have to look at.
OK so now I have gxine running properly I have had a chance to see what it can do in relation to DVB
The things lacking for me are:
No list of channel names to choose from
no Gui recording
No facility to record the program you are watching
Please do not get me wrong, I think gxine and mplayer are good at what they do, but I think extra support for DVB stuff in the form of a GUI is a useful addition.
What I intend to end up with will be similar in function to Kaffeine but purely to watch TV via DVB.
I now have a very basic recording facility in the program and am working on recording whilst watching a program, when I have that done I will probably make it available here if there is any interest from puppyists who use DVB to watch TV.
The things lacking for me are:
No list of channel names to choose from
no Gui recording
No facility to record the program you are watching
Please do not get me wrong, I think gxine and mplayer are good at what they do, but I think extra support for DVB stuff in the form of a GUI is a useful addition.
What I intend to end up with will be similar in function to Kaffeine but purely to watch TV via DVB.
I now have a very basic recording facility in the program and am working on recording whilst watching a program, when I have that done I will probably make it available here if there is any interest from puppyists who use DVB to watch TV.
Hi Deeveebee
It is good to hear of your interest, I have now released alpha 3
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=18148
ALpha 4 will probably be the last alph before moving to a beta version. However because of work commitments this may be a while before I post it.
Alpha 3 works very well for me on a day to day basis, but then again I know its limitations, please read the info in the above link.
Once I have put a few more items of functionality in I will start to make it a bit more sophisticated.
If you give it a try I would be interested in any feedback.
All the best
Gary
It is good to hear of your interest, I have now released alpha 3
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=18148
ALpha 4 will probably be the last alph before moving to a beta version. However because of work commitments this may be a while before I post it.
Alpha 3 works very well for me on a day to day basis, but then again I know its limitations, please read the info in the above link.
Once I have put a few more items of functionality in I will start to make it a bit more sophisticated.
If you give it a try I would be interested in any feedback.
All the best
Gary