Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 01:35:04 +0000 From: Danny Pansters <danny@ricin.com> To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Available for testing: Kbtv -- KDE TV viewer for bktr Message-ID: <200511010135.04195.danny@ricin.com>
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Hi all, If you have a bktr based TV or capture card and are using KDE on FreeBSD 5, 6, or 7 I'd like to invite you to try out Kbtv. It is a small and simple TV viewing app written mostly in python. Uses PyKDE for GUI and mplayer for rendering. For quite a while I wasn't too happy with the offerings for TV viewers, especially under KDE. Fxtv works but looks out of place. Mplayer is arguably the best TV renderer available for us. But KMplayer has a rather bad GUI for using TV and because it starts a new mplayer instance (kicking the bktr driver and/or the hardware) everytime you switch channels it exhibits frequent hard freezes. If merely using the tuner (through ioctls) such things don't happen. This made me write btcontrol, which is a small C program that does a selection of the available ioctls. I've also been the maintainer for the PyQt and PyKDE ports for quite a while now, and it was about time to actually use it in an app that's useful for me as well as for other *BSD folks (and figure out, which I've now done at least partially, how QT and KDE really work... lots of reading/googling mainly). And so I made Kbtv, with simplicity being a priority as well in the GUI as under the hood. I'm sure it still has plenty bugs and things that might be Done Better (but perhaps Never Will) (TM) but I've been using it for several months now -- first through a few python modules with mplayer, later with mplayer embedded in the GUI -- and it works fine and is quite fast. I must say that I have P4 3.4GHz and 1.5GHz boxen on which I tested and both aren't exactly skinny of course. Obviously I only have one signal here (through cable, and basically all of Holland is cable with similar signals). I've been able to test two TV cards: a Miro bt848 (temic pal) and a Pinnacle/WinTV bt878 (philips pal + FM). So I'm interested in any results. Specifically how it works with antenna (is the 1MHz unit scanning good enough), if/how it works out with ntsc and with other tuner units, whether secam can be stomped into working after all ... Please see http://freebsd.ricin.com/kbtv for tarball, port, package, bugs and screenshot. Run it through your KDE menu or by running 'kbtv'. I'd like to move to one or more BETA's soon, then PR it as a release. It's been sitting on my desktop for too long :) Any testing is very much appreciated. Thanks for your interest, Dan PS1: Yes, I looked at kdetv first, but considering the mediocre performance I experienced under Linux (tried ark a while ago and debian recently and it's still bad) and the fact that one would have to make first a generalization for btkr to fit in with v4l[1][2] and then bend over backwards to make that fit in with the bktr reality again, I gave up. I did try. It even compiled and ran (without video though). PS2: Kbtv does not support teletext or recording and that's not going to change.
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