Me TV is a DVB – digital video broadcast – viewer based on GTK+3 and GStreamer.
NB This is a rewrite of Me TV for GTK+3 and GStreamer using the Rust programming language and the gtk-rs and gstreamer-rs bindings.
The home page for previous versions of Me TV is Me TV Home Page on Launchpad.
To run Me TV, it is assumed you have the following installed:
- GTK+ 3.18.0 or later.
- GStreamer 1.12.0 or later for Me TV 3.0.x, or GStreamer 1.16.0 or later for Me TV 3.1.x or later.
- The GStreamer plugins – currently the DVB plugin is in the bad package; it started there for
historical reasons, and although it is not now bad, it is good, it has never migrated to the
good package. Some of the other bits and pieces that might get used during use of Me TV are in
the ugly package, so best to install that; the things in there aren't actually ugly, some are
indeed very nice – long story. On Debian at least some plugins from the GStreamer are separated
out for Debian repository package publishing: the libav, gl, and gtk3 plugins are in their own
Debian packages rather than being in one of base, good, bad, ugly GStreamer packages – sorry the
term package is a bit over-used in this context. So, using Debian, you probably want to make
sure the following Debian packages are installed:
- gstreamer1.0-plugins-base
- gstreamer1.0-plugins-good
- gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad
- gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
- gstreamer1.0-libav
- gstreamer1.0-gtk3
- gstreamer1.0-gl
This list of distribution packages should apply also to Ubuntu and Mint distributions. Fedora Rawhide probably doesn't have some of these last few, the Fedora packagers do not separate things as much as the Debian packagers do.
For building Me TV from source code you need the development packages installed, not just the library packages. So on Debian the libgtk-3-dev, libgstreamer1.0-dev, and libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev packages. But you will not need these to run Me TV if you get pre-compiled executables.
Most users of Me TV will not want to be bothered with trying to build the executables from source code. Pre-compiled executables are therefore available on Bintray; a set of pre-compiled executables for each release. The Me TV project page is here. Go to the release you are interested in and there is section "Files" that has the pre-compiled executables for that release.
If you are going to build the executables from source, you need to either take a clone of this repository, or download a release tarball. You will then need to build the executable. This being a Rust program all build is handled using Cargo – though there is a Meson/Ninja build for those who wish to use that, Rust and Cargo are still needed though, the Meson/Ninja build just manages use of Cargo. Rust and Cargo may be packaged for your operating system, but most people use Rustup to install Rust and Cargo so as to stay up to date with both.
Once you have Rust and Cargo installed, by whatever means, then in the directory of the Me TV project, typing the command:
cargo build
will create a debug build, add the --release option to the command line to get a release
build.
Of course there is always the option of typing:
cargo run --bin me-tv
to build and also run the program if the build is successful. Again the --release option is
available on this command line – but see below about creating the channels configuration file,
which must happen before you can watch television using Me TV.
If you want to make use of the Meson/Ninja build you will need Meson and Ninja installed. Usually this is by installing the relevant packages. You will need to clone the Me TV Git repository or download a release tarball just as above. If you then cd into the directory, and run:
mkdir Build
cd Build
meson --prefx=$HOME/Built ..
ninja
a build of Me TV using Cargo will happen. The prefix option to the meson command is only
needed if you are not going to install Me TV to the usual place. Once the build is complete:
ninja install
will install Me TV.
Before being able to watch a television channel using Me TV, you must have a channels file for the transmitter you are getting DVB signal from. This channels file is $HOME/.config/gstreamer-1.0/dvb-channels.conf. It is assumed this file is in DVBv5 format, DVBv3 format files will cause an error.
A way of creating this file from a running Me TV is available using the menu on the application window, currently it requires the executable dvbv5-scan be installed. On Debian Sid this is in package dvb-tools, whereas on Fedora Rawhide it is in the package v4l-utils – for some reason Debian splits out the DVB tools from the V4L utils, whereas Fedora keeps them all together. To create the channels file you will not only need dvbv5-scan installed but also the transmitter data files. These are in the package dtv-scan-tables on both Debian and Fedora. However Debian installs them to /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/ whereas Fedora installs them to /usr/share/dvbv5/dvb-t/. You will also need to set the correct delivery system for your area. For example, Europe, Australia, and many other placed use DVB-T, North America uses ATSC.
To have the channels file available before executing Me TV you can run dvbv5-scan manually. For example:
dvbv5-scan --output=~/.config/gstreamer-1.0/dvb-channels.conf /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/uk-CrystalPalace
on a Debian system (Fedora puts the transmitter files in a slightly different place) will do the right thing if you live in the Crystal Palace transmitter region in the UK. I suspect people will want to scan on their local transmitter, in which case you should replace the dvb-t/uk-CrystalPalace with the name appropriate for the location you are when you run Me TV.
The Crystal Palace example is for a delivery system using DVB-T, if your area uses a different delivery system (ATSC, DVB-C, ISDB-T, etc.) the transmitter files are in different directories, for example /usr/share/dvb/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB
If you do not have dvb5-scan installed then best advice is to install it, preferably using the Linux distribution package management. If that is not possible then dvbscan or w_scan can be used to create the needed file, but it must be in DVBv5 format, not DVBv3 format.
When started the initial screen of Me TV shows the frontends available or a message if none are connected. It should show any new ones as they are connected – and remove ones as they are removed. Each frontend button is a toggle button for the associated display for that frontend. Clicking on a frontend button will start a new frame, tune the frontend to the channel that is shown, and start playing the channel. Channels can be changed and there is a full screen capability.
Hopefully the UI is intuitive and gives a good UX. If not please feel free to submit an issue.
The main Me TV program is a GUI for watching TV. With it come two command line programs:
- me-tv-record records a named channel for a given period to a named MPEG-4 file. The created files can be watched using Glide or Totem (or any other viewer program that can play MPEG-4 files).
- me-tv-schedule sets up execution of me-tv-record at a given time in the future, i.e. it schedules recording a given channel for a given duration outputting to a given file, starting at a given time in the future.
It is not yet possible to start a recording from the Me TV GUI, but things are being planned.
Me TV 3 has been developed and tested using only DVB-T and DVB-T2, none of the other delivery systems (DVB-C, DVB-S, DVB-S2, ATSC, ISDB-T) have been tested by the developer. It is believed all the delivery systems should work, but… it isn't possible to test non-DVB-T and non-DVB-T2 broadcast in a DVB-T and DVB-T2 broadcast region. However, there is now at least one person using Me TV 3 in an ATSC area, and it works. Which is good. This still leaves no data on whether Me TV works with DVB-C, DVB-S, DVB-S2, and ISDB-T, reports of success are awaited.
This code is licenced under GPLv3.
