DVB-T and MPEG4/AVC

[charon]

DVB-T in Poland (where I live) is during the test phase. Since now MPEG2 standard has been used, but the authorities have decided to switch to MPEG4/AVC (h264) standard. Now all channels are temporarily transmitted in both standards, but MPEG2 streams are supposed to be turned off soon.

Here is the problem. No Linux application support DVB-T with MPEG4. Even if Kaffeine has no problem with playing films encoded in h264, it can't deal with DVB. I've got no picture.

Is MPEG-4/AVC standard planned to be supported in the future?

[hftom]

It is.

[hftom]

could you record a sample (with kaffeine) and upload it somewhere for me to test?

[charon]

Here it is

[hftom]

It plays with latest ffmpeg svn (with PAFF), but looks like you have a bad signal ...
So atm, in order to play H264 dvb-t with kaffeine, you need to:
- compile and install ffmpeg svn (lots of --enable-XXX required, look at ./configure help)
- compile and install xine-lib=>1.1.8 with --with-external-ffmpeg configure flag (also check configure results for xcb videoout plugins, these are required)

[charon]

Thanks.

I know about problems with signal level. The transmission is during test stage and the transmitter has only 1.3kW ERP and sometimes I have to play with the antenna to make the signal strong enough.

[Spice_Boy]

Hi,

I also live in Poland and am trying to do exactly the same thing as you. Unfortunately, I didn't have any luck following the suggestions that were made. The best I could do was record the stream and 'try' and view it on kplayer, but it was mainly a garbled mess.

Charon, did you end up having any luck with it?

I am using Slax and can view TVP1, TVP2, and TVPInfo just fine. All the others I can only hear.

[hftom]

Could you record a sample and upload it somewhere?

[Spice_Boy]

Here you go. I believe it's transport stream, containing one channel.
There are 2 examples there.

http://210.9.75.200/~spicy/dvb/

[hftom]

Ok, i do confirm that both files work here.
So, how do you get it, right?

First, read this entirely before starting.

1) Get the latest ffmpeg svn sources.

2) cd ffmpeg

3) ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264 --enable-liba52 --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libxvid --enable-pp
(This is my configure options, yours may vary, depending on what you want ffmpeg to support, at leat you need the 4 first )

4) make install (make sure it will overwrite any previous version, you can adjust the --prefix configure flag if needed (default to /usr/local) )

5) Get latest xine-lib sources (1.1.10.1)

6) cd xine-lib

7) ./configure --with-external-ffmpeg (also use --prefix to overwrite previous installation, default to /usr/local )

Check xine configure results. You MUST see these lines:
- xcb-shm (X shared memory using XCB)
- xcb-xv (XVideo using XCB)
If you don't, you have to install devel packages (xcb-shape-dev, xcb-shm-dev, xcb-xv-dev, xcb-dev), names may vary.

9) make install

Now it should work.

P.S.
You may have to install various other devel packages for ffmpeg and/or xine-lib to compile, depending on your system.
If kaffeine has problems playing your channels, try to play recordings with ffplay (ffplay /path/to/file.m2t) to see if it's a xine-lib or ffmpeg bug.

[Spice_Boy]

Thank you for the explicit instructions. I only just woke up, but I will try this today. I'm sure I'll read the instructions completely at least 8 times before starting to make sure!

I'll let you know how I go

[Spice_Boy]

All was seemingly going well, but I have to update something because I couldn't ./configure xine. I got this message

checking for FFMPEG... configure: error: Package requirements (libavcodec >= 51.20.0) were not met:

Requested 'libavcodec >= 51.20.0' but version of libavcodec is 50.1.0

so I'll have to find this libavcodec and get that happening too I guess.

[hftom]

libavcodec is the main ffmpeg library.
Again, make sure to overwrite or remove old ffmpeg installations.

[Spice_Boy]

My distro is Slax (liveCD) so if I remove the modules before boot, they should not be there.

I saw a libavcodec directory amoungst the ffmpeg files so assumed this might be the case.

I tried to make ffmpeg but it complained that x264 isn't there, but I can run the x264 command.

It's getting a bit much for me now. I got the newest versions of x264 and ffmpeg but still no joy. I'm going to have to sit back for a while and see if anyone else can come up with something

...but I thought I was so close

[hftom]

You could try without x264, i think h264 decoding would still be compiled (x264 is for encoding)