AleVT

Videotext / Teletext is an information retrieval service provided by television broadcast companies mostly in Europe.

For more general information on Videotext see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

alevt is a program to use Videotext for analog and digital TV. It is available for many distributions.

Using alevt by hand

You can use alevt only while watching TV over another program. alevt will show teletext for the currently running TV station.

For use with DVB, alevt must be started like this:

alevt -vbi /dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0

Now the problem is that on one frequency there are many channels, so alevt is just takig the first one.

Normally you want to see teletext for the currently running TV station. That can be done like follows:

To select a program, you must use the alevt output:

Service ID 0x000e Type 0x01 Provider Name "ARD" Name "Das Erste"
 PMT PID 0x0578 TXT: PID 0x057c lang ger type 0x01 magazine 1 page   0 
Service ID 0x000c Type 0x01 Provider Name "ARD" Name "rbb Berlin"
 PMT PID 0x04b0 TXT: PID 0x04b4 lang ger type 0x01 magazine 1 page   0

You just have to get the TXT PID for the tv station, e.g. "0x57c" for "Das Erste".

Now run

alevt -vbi /dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0 -pid 0x578 100

Now the Videotext start page should be shown.

The "100" at the end of the line leads to the start page, otherwise the start page would have to be selected by hand.

Program for easy using of alevt

There is a script that shows a graphical dialog with the available TV stations. The user can select the desired TV station by name and the teletext is shown automatically.

The script can be downloaded here: [[1]]

To use the script, just run

sh findTxt

on the commandline.

You can put the script on yor Desktop and start it directly from there, if you set the executable bit for the script (how to do this. see linux forums :-))

Have Fun!