DVB-T viewing apps..? help out a sort-of-n00b?

[Mug Funky]

hi all. after 5 years with not so much as a windows reinstall, i finally ditched the lot and bought a new computer. while i was getting bits for it, i got a DVB-T card (i'm in australia).

so that's the background info :)

are there any programs out there (preferably opensource, definitely free) that will allow my to not have to use the software that came with the card? it kinda sucks in so many ways that i don't care to list them.

the card is a "v-stream xpert dtv dvb pci" thing (i just read the box)

the system is:
athlon 64 venice 3500 939 pin
gigabyte k8n blahblah motherboard
1 gig hyundai ram (does that even matter?)
gigabyte 6600GT viddy card. 128megs ram i think, PCI-E

running win2k and fedora core 3 (the latter i haven't really touched yet... i'm a 'nix n00b).

oh, btw i tried to install mythTV but it's complaining that i need an older version of .NET, which is pretty stupid IMHO.

[DrP]

See the DBA Forums (http://www.dtvforum.info) and the DVBOwners forum (http://www.dvbowners.com) for dvb apps. Most are moving to BDA support for Windows. There have been a few threads about *nix apps too.

[nexx]

Viewing : DigitalWatch. Check out this thread (http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=3154) for a experimental version with BDA support.
I like it because you can use any directshow decoders/filters by building the graphs for it.

Recording: WebScheduler (http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://dvb-ws.sourceforge.net/&e=10431)

This is all assuming your card has BDA drivers.

[sigmaris]

I use MyTheatre (http://www.dvbcore.com) with my TwinHan card. It'll work with any BDA-compatible drivers and some older non-BDA cards, can schedule recordings at any time, do timeshifting, use customised directshow decoders/graphs, has full program guide support, etc. It's shareware though, the free version only works for 1 hour. But I think it's worth paying for. If you want a free option, try DC-DVB Source (http://www.dsp-worx.de/?n=11). It's a DirectShow source filter for digital TV which makes it possible to view digital TV in any DirectShow player, e.g. Media Player Classic. It's quite good as well, the only thing it lacks is the possibility of recording to some format other than DVR-MS (microsoft proprietary standard, hard to use with anything else).

Re your MythTV problems, if you're trying to install the MythTV frontend for Windows, bear in mind that that the frontend needs a backend (the actual MythTV program) to actually do all the recording and stuff. And the backend software only runs on Linux, so there isn't any way to use MythTV without a linux machine. If you want to use the card in Linux, your kernel will have to have video4linux, linux DVB support, "cx88" and "cx88_dvb" drivers, either as modules or built in to the kernel.

[Mug Funky]

@ sigmaris:

thanks for the infos. it's a real pain that there's no free (and windows) software for DVB stuff.

i've got fedora core 3 installed, but haven't learnt to use it yet. also, all my avisynth are belong to windows, so i'd rather do it all inside windows...

i'll try those other 2 programs. perhaps GraphEdit would allow my to output raw mpeg streams from that dshow filter you mentioned?

[LightningFire]

There is a list with some DVB programs and their hardware compatibility at
http://www.dvbsoft.net/content.php?article.11.
However this tends to create the new problem of finding out on what generic design your hardware is based (there is some info on that on the bottom of that page but I didn't notice anything about v-stream, neither do I know wether v-stream makes original designs).

I also do not know in how far the info on that link is different from the links already posted here, as the chart is already quite old, also it is mainly meant for dvb-s.

All those limitations aside- it might be usefull. :p

Greetings