A short while ago I got a tip to an useful DVB streaming application named dvbstream. It is primarily used to stream an DVB stream over the network or into pipes. The big advantage is, that you can pipe the MPEG stream directly into a file and save much CPU power, because of missing decoding and encoding. Installation

At first you will need to compile the sources. Unpack the source and enter the directory where the source file are. Finally type make to start the compilation of dvbstream.

tar xvfz dvbstream-0.5.tar.gz
cd dvbstream-0.5
make

If are using Kernel 2.6 and your Kernel header files in /usr/include/linux are <=2.4, you should get an error message like this:

tune.c:33:27: linux/dvb/dmx.h: No such file or directory
tune.c:34:32: linux/dvb/frontend.h: No such file or directory
...

To get rid of these errors you have to add the new Kernel headers to Makefile's CFLAGS, done by a little sed command. If your current running Kernel is <=2.4, you have to patch the sources with linuxtv-DVB.

mv Makefile Makefile.old
sed -r "s@^(CFLAGS = )@\1-I/usr/src/linux-$(uname -r)/include@" Makefile.old > Makefile

Recording

For dvbstream you need to know the frequency, polarisation and so on - for easy handling have a look at watch_dvb, which only needs the channel name and target file to record the stream.

watch_dvb ZDF file /tmp/rec-`date +%F-%H%M`.mpeg

Playback

Watch recorded DVB stream using xine or mplayer:

cat /tmp/rec-2004-05-09-1520.mpeg | xine stdin://
mplayer /tmp/rec-2004-05-09-1520.mpeg