Ubuntu – Is it really possible to set up VLC to stream TV from TV tuner card ENCORE “ENLTV-FM3”

streamtvtv-tunervlc

After 2 weeks of searching for any solution, I could say that I didnt find any way to make this work. I'm on Xubuntu 12.04 from Work, and I saw that with VLC was possible to capture TV and then stream it. So, I decided to install my TV tuner, and then VLC. All those tutorials seemed to be so easy to configure and all that, but… no one helped me. First of all:

1 – VLC detects my TV tuner perfectly, and it seems to take signal, but it only shows that famous gray screen when no one channel could be tuned.

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2 – I can't change channels, to see if TV tuner syntonizes some of them, at least one!!!.

3 – Of course I can't test streaming till I can't set up previous points. But, there's a problem… I couldnt find just only one tutorial to explain me the correct way to stream in VLC. There're a lot of them but referred to windows… those are very different than in Ubuntu, and it can't apply. Many people told me that they couldnt make VLC work, so… I dont know any other option in Ubuntu to do this what I need, so… I hope you can help me with this!

My idea was to capture TV from TV tuner, and then stream it; no in another software, but on a WEB page. Many tutorials say that it's possible! and they do it, but… or it's about windows, or VLC version they use is very old against the newest you find in Ubuntu Repositories and it's almost impossible to adapt it (of course when I try, it doesnt work anyway).

Any help would be very appreciated!

Best Answer

There are two possibilities on how to grab video from a TV tuner :

  1. You can grab the video-stream from composite video output such as audio/video connectors on the back of satellite receiver. You request the composite video input of the TV tuner with this command:

    vlc v4l2://dev/video0:input=1

    or you can add :input=1 to video0 in the GUI

    input= could be 1 or 2 or 3 depending on your card and which socket you connect to.

  2. You can grab video from the RF source using the tuner in the card and set it to specific channel, then you will need the following :

    • You must know the specific frequency of the channel you want because VLC does't have a search function to RF channels. If you don't know the frequency you can use this tvtime to search the channels for you. You can install it in the software center

      Note the number of the channel and then go to this frequency table wiki to find out the specific frequency of the channel you want.

    • Now you know your channel frequency it's to open it by vlc 

      vlc v4l2:///dev/video0 :v4l2-tuner-frequency=471250

      or by putting the frequency in the advanced v4l2 options through the GUI.

      In this example the frequency was written in the wiki page like this: 471,25

    • Don't forget to hock up an audio wire between your TV tuner audio out and your sound-card audio input (mic or line-in)

Now you can grab the video and audio and the rest is exactly the same as transcoding and streaming a file which can be done through terminal by :

vlc v4l2:///dev/video0 :v4l2-tuner-frequency=471250 (your v4l2 options) --sout (your streaming options)

or through the GUIby choosing your streaming profile and options .

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