Transport Stream Conversion

You already installed the dvb-mpegtools in section 3.1, so you have all that you need to convert transport to program streams.

After having tzapped to a suitable channel, record it using cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 > flick.mpg. Of course, replace flick.mpg with something more descriptive.

If you wish to watch your recording, type ts2ps flick.mpg 0 0 | mplayer -.

To watch TV on your computer screen, you supposedly type

cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/vdr0 | ts2ps 0 0 | mplayer -

but that doesn't work for me. You can replace the zeroes with the Video-PID and the Audio-PID from channels.conf, but it still gives a butchered picture.

Alex Woods writes that different video outs should be tried if picture quality is low; he recommends -vo xv as an mplayer option. He also explains that ts2ps reports data rates from the mpeg headers, which are often wrong.

You can now continue to experiment with programs like vdr, xine and the like (Brendan Bispham reports that xine works ``out -of-the-box'' on gentoo). Alternatively, you can go back to section 2.1 and watch TV.