Dtv-scan-tables

dtv-scan-tables

In order to be able receive a particular signal with your TV tuner device you will need to tune/set it to the correct radio frequency used by that source transmission. Therefore, you (or, at least, the viewing application you are using) will first want to know which frequencies are used for transmission and, thereby, may be tunable by your receiver at your residing location.

While there applications like w_scan that tries (hard) to guess those frequencies, this can take a long time to produce the needed channel tables.

So, most of the applications assume that a physical channel/transponder's table is already available.

LinuxTV hosts a channel table set at [dvb-scan-tables.git].

The tables provided there use the dvbv5 format, as described at DVBv5_Tools, as this is more convenient, as they cover all possible Digital TV standards and can easily be converted to other formats.

Converting dvb-scan-tables to other formats

A Makefile target is provided to convert all tables to the legacy channel format used by scan. For it to work, you need to have v4l-utils installed (specifically, the v4l-utils package that contains the dvbv5 utils).

Be sure that you have at least version 1.4.0 installed. Versions below may work too, but some DVB files (DVB-T2/DVB-S2) won't be properly parsed with earlier versions.

You can download and install v4l-utils from: [v4l-utils.git]

Please look at v4l-utils for more details.

Once having it installed, generating all the tables usind DVBv3 channel format is as easy as running (from a directory with a clone of dtv-scan-tables):

$ make clean
$ make dvbv3

The files can also be individually converted from DVBv5 to DVBv3 with:

$ dvb-format-convert -I dvbv5 -O channel dvb-c/ch-Rega-Sense legacy-format-ch-Rega-Sense

And converting back into DVBv5 format with:

$ dvb-format-convert -I channel -O dvbv5 legacy-format-ch-Rega-Sense dvb-c/ch-Rega-Sense

Plese notice that comments are not preserved when doing the conversions.

Note: If you're willing to submit new entries and/or corrections, please be sure to use the DVBv5 format and to send them via e-mail to [linux-media@vger.kernel.org].

Tarballs and Kaffeine's scanfile.dvb

Once per week, a script checks if newer commits were added to [dvb-scan-tables.git]. If so, it will auto-generate a tarball at [LinuxTV downloads] containing the latest channel definitions.

It will also convert it to the format with Kaffeine expects, with puts everything inside a [Kaffeine's scanfile.dvb]. After a while, the same file is reflected at [KDE's site]. On Kaffeine, a button inside TV configuration/General Options allows to download such file, in order to use the latest channel definitions.