Ubuntu – What DAB+ radio tuners work well with Ubuntu

hardwareinternet-radio

I currently have an FM tuner hooked up to my desktop that I use to listen to the radio. Since my country is in the process of switching to the DAB+ standard, I was wondering whether there are any similar devices available for the newer radio standard that are compatible with Ubuntu.

A USB tuner would be good, but a PCIe or PCI card would be acceptable too. It'd be nice if the tuner provided access to the data services transmitted along with the audio (e.g. the name of the current program/song), and access to the audio bitstream (i.e. it doesn't decode the audio internally and feed it to the line-in jack of the sound card).

Best Answer

I recommend you try any of the DAB+/DVB tuners based on the Realtek RTL2839U chipset (of which there are many); drivers for that chipset are actively developed in the community, by both people interested in the radio/TV aspect as well as people interested in the software-defined radio capabilities of the chip (it is capable of tuning to any signal between 64-1700 MHz with the appropriate antenna/software).

USB tuners are available which provide internal audio (as requested), and are capable of decoding metadata.

Here are some resources:

Driver for 3.2 kernels; others are also available
A popular USB DAB+ radio with the RTL2839U

Other models which are verified to work with the driver in (1) are:

DIKOM USB-DVBT HD (ID 1b80:d394)
NILOX DVB-T Stick N15 (ID 1b80:d393)
TRUST 16738 (ID 0bda:2832)
TERRATEC Cinergy T Stick BLACK (ID 0ccd:00a9)
TX Hollywood DVTB (ID 1d19:1101)
DIGIVOX mini II v3.0 (ID 1d19:1101)

For even more compatible models, see this Ubuntu Forums thread
Players that work with DAB+ include Kaffeine, as well as more general DVB players/applications.

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I am the owner of a Kindle and, until a couple of weeks ago, of a Sony Reader. As you explain, and not everyone understood, you can manage both devices with Calibre, but you CAN NOT manage DRM epubs on the Sony unless you use their software (=> Windows). You have to register in Adobe or something like that (actually, I never cared to do it) and it's not possible in Linux.

So your choice is reduced to the Kindle, honestly. First of all, a Kindle is actually a modified Android (it gets recognized as such if you visit certain websites). In addition, I can't think of any Android device with e-ink display.

My advice would be to go for the Kindle. It's a great device for reading, buying from their shop is ridiculously easy and you won't have any problems finding free books for it elsewhere (if you can't find them in .mobi, which is rare, you can convert them with calibre).

I actually bought the Sony in the first place because I was concerned about the EPUB issue, but found out that is almost never an issue.

Ubuntu – Listening radio with Mplayer in terminal

You can set mplayer's cache with -cache argument on command line as well as specifying the initial cache fill before playback with '-cache-min'.

Try:

$ mplayer -cache 8192 -cache-min 80 <url>

p.s. 8192 should be enough, however, you can increase that number according to your needs. Note that the initial cache fill without the '-cache-min' option is only 20%.

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