To all those who have tried to use vlc to view TV channels on their computers

[Basil Chupin]

For years I have used xine (to view DVB-T television and DVDs) as well 
as kaffeine (to record most TV channels) and vlc to be able to view DVDs 
from a directory on the HD (because kaffeine lost that ability almost 2 
years ago).

Today, I broke the "secret" of having vlc recognise and display TV 
channels on my DVB card! Not mentioned anywhere in the documentation but 
a casual read of a comment in the vieolan forum solved my problem which 
has been bugging me for a looooooooong, looooong time.

I can now view DVDs, view TV (terrestrial in my case, but cable or 
satellite as well if you have either), record programs, capture 
snapshots, edit the files....

The missing link which nobody could provide me with is: you need to use 
w-scan to create the same channels.conf file which xine uses and then 
start vlc with the command line "vlc %U 
<directory-where-channels.conf-is>/channels.conf".

As simple as this - but this is not mentioned in the dox for vlc :-( .



BTW, the version of vlc for Lucid, 10.04, is out of date - the latest is 
1.1.1 (well, 1.1.2 actually).

The vlc site states that what is in 10.04 is out of date and tells you 
to install the latest version manually.

But try and find on the vlc site the latest version to manually install 
it...........forget it, sweetheart! :-( . You can find the files for 
Windows and MAC but not for Ubuntu - you need to jump thru hoops to get 
the one for Ubuntu.

BC

-- 
If nothing happens, nothing can go wrong.