Kaffeine & DVB-TV

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I guess the kernel does not include a HEVC-codec/encoder (H.265) that is
used for DVB-T2. You need to install ffmpeg or what ever else is used by
the dependency chain of Kaffeine. However, if the channels are found,
but the screen stays black, the culprit might be an antenna signal that
is too weak or too strong and/or decryption of pay TV channels fails.

Btw. "kernal" is a Commodore term, Linux is a "kernel". My understanding
is, that the kernel provides an API for it. What ever this means.
Kaffeine seems to depend on libvlc and this might rely on an installed
codec.

>From a German Ubuntu Wiki ( https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Kaffeine/ ):

      "sudo apt-get install kaffeine libxine2-plugins libxine2-ffmpeg language-pack-kde-de"
      
      "TV screen stays black
      
      If you are using an NVIDIA graphics card, TV channels have been
      successfully scanned, but then no TV picture appears and other media may
      not be played either, start in the terminal [3]
      
      kaffeine
      
      If you then get the following error message as output:
      
      eceived X error event: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
      X Error: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) 8
      Extension: 132 (Uknown extension)
      Minor opcode: 17 (Unknown request)
      Resource id: 0x3f
      KCrash: Application 'kaffeine-xbu' crashing...
      sock_file=/home/BENUTZER/.kde/socket-2k/kdeinit4__0
      
      In this case, installing the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver via
      "System → System Management → Additional Drivers" might help. This
      procedure was tested under Ubuntu 10.04."
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^ The information is a little bit
      outdated ;).
      
I dislike using a Linux PC for playing media. All players suffer from one or
the other issue. For television I used set-top boxes for DVB-T/DVB-T2 and I'm
still using a DVB-T2 set-top box and a DVB-T2 smart TV. Depending on the
weather I had a lot of issues with outdoor and indoor antennas and antenna
boosters. At the moment the antenna signals are ok, but HbbTV fails to work on
both devices. The smart TV for example can connect to the Internet when using
the Android's Seraphic browser, but if I try to use HbbTV by e.g. the "red
button" it claims that no Internet connection is available. I know that it
sometimes needs to be activated and I already was in contact with the support
to no avail.

All those modern cheap television devices are much likely using the cheapest
crap from China under the hood. In the past television sets were very
expensive, but they worked OOTB.

Regards,
Ralf