Simplest way to watch TV (DVB-T USB card) on Ubuntu?

[Aart Koelewijn]

On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:17:33 +0100, Gilles Gravier wrote:

> Hi gang!
> 
> So... I'm looking for the simplest way, on a Ubuntu laptop to plug a USB
> DVB-T card, and watch TV from it. What's the minimal fuss solution? Not
> looking for something fancy that will turn the machine into a full
> fledged media server (though if that's what it takes, well... I'll
> resort to that).
> 
> On Windoze, most of these cards come with a driver and a piece of
> software that does TV viewing (and time-shifting and hard disk
> recording, which I don't really need - but will accept if it comes with
> the Ubuntu way as well)
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Gilles.

I have put a Hauppage WinTV Nova-TD USB dongle into the USB-port of my 
laptop and can now watch TV on my boat with Ubuntu 8.04. I suppose 8.10 
will work too, but since I upgraded the weather hasn't been nice enough 
to stay on the boat. I remember I had to do a little bit of configuring, 
read a bit of documentation and download a file with all channels which 
have to be scanned over here, but can now watch all free digital 
channels. I don't remember what I did exactly, but as far as I can 
remember it mostly had to do with something called v4l-dvb. Looking at 
the documentation for that will be helpfull.

Aart