The DVB frontend device controls the tuner and DVB demodulator hardware. It can be accessed through /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0. Data types and and ioctl definitions can be accessed by including linux/dvb/frontend.h in your application.

DVB frontends come in three varieties: DVB-S (satellite), DVB-C (cable) and DVB-T (terrestrial). Transmission via the internet (DVB-IP) is not yet handled by this API but a future extension is possible. For DVB-S the frontend device also supports satellite equipment control (SEC) via DiSEqC and V-SEC protocols. The DiSEqC (digital SEC) specification is available from Eutelsat http://www.eutelsat.org/.

Note that the DVB API may also be used for MPEG decoder-only PCI cards, in which case there exists no frontend device.