Installing Gnome DVB Daemon on Ubuntu Jaunty

In the last few months there have appeared various blog postings on Planet Gnome about a mysterious Gnome DVB Daemon (http://live.gnome.org/DVBDaemon). So I decided to give it a try on a Ubuntu Jaunty system with a DVB-T USB stick. The hardware itself was detected just fine by the kernel, and after some w_scan fiddling Totem also offered live watching; but I wanted to see if there’s something more user-friendly available, mainly for scanning and for EPG.

For the impatient: yes, after finishing the crazy building and installation steps, it looks quite promising.

So, installation time:

Install GStreamer 0.10.23

• add “deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gstreamer-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main” to /etc/apt/sources.list
• install/upgrade libgstreamer0.10-dev (version 0.10.23-1~bpo40+1 at the moment), libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev and related packages

Install Gnome RTSP Server

• apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
• wget “http://people.freedesktop.org/~wtay/gst-rtsp-0.10.3.tar.bz2”
• tar xfj gst-rtsp-0.10.3.tar.bz2
• cd gst-rtsp-0.10.3
• ./configure
• make
• sudo checkinstall

Install newer libgee (Jaunty only ships 0.1.3)

• wget “http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libgee/0.1/libgee-0.1.5.tar.bz2”
• tar xfj libgee-0.1.5.tar.bz2
• cd libgee-0.1.5
• ./configure
• make
• sudo checkinstall

Install Gnome DVB Daemon

• apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev libgee-dev libsqlite3-dev
• wget “http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-dvb-daemon/0.1/gnome-dvb-daemon-0.1.7.tar.bz2”
• tar xfj gnome-dvb-daemon-0.1.7.tar.bz2
• cd gnome-dvb-daemon-0.1.7
• ./configure –enable-totem-plugin
• make
• sudo checkinstall

Install data files etc.

• sudo apt-get install dvb-utils

Move Totem plugin to correct location (well… at least, on my system Totem doesn’t look in /usr/local/lib/totem/plugins/):

• sudo cp -r /usr/local/lib/totem/plugins/dvb-daemon/ /usr/lib/totem/plugins/

Fix Totem plugin (here, Totem failed to load the plugin with error message "Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file /usr/lib/totem/plugins/dvb-daemon/dvb-daemon.py on line 1," etc.):

• sudo gedit /usr/lib/totem/plugins/dvb-daemon/dvb-daemon.py
• add this as first line in the file (before the Copyright line):
  

  # coding=utf8

For running Gnome DVB Daemon, have a look at the User Guide at http://live.gnome.org/DVBDaemon/UserGuide . EPG, scheduled recording, and the Totem plugin (for live viewing, or viewing recordings) should work fine. Basically run gnome-dvb-setup to scan for channels, then run gnome-dvb-control, go to Preferences dialog to set up “groups” (using the channel file saved in gnome-dvb-setup), and that’s it.

Some quirks I noticed so far:

• when using the plugin for first time after starting Totem, it will try to install a decoder for “private/teletext” but doesn’t find a matching package – that doesn’t seem to do any harm, though.
• viewing live video in Totem using the plugin often fails with error message “Could not read from resource.” (and if you run totem on console, you can also see a “503 (Service Unavailable)” error message). No idea what causes this.
• EPG data in gnome-dvb-control is not available for all channels. Maybe it needs some more time to collect data, or maybe DVB signal is too weak. Unfortunately the GUI doesn’t indicate in the station list for which stations it has EPG data available.