Viewing TV and Video

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You can use Fedora tools and applications to view movies and other video presentations on your PC. This section presents some TV and motion picture video software tools included with the Fedora Core Linux distribution you received with this book.

In addition to the information you read here, you should review Chapter 3, "Installing Fedora," and Chapter 6, "The X Window System," to learn more about installing and configuring your video graphics card.

TV and Video Hardware

To watch TV and video content on your PC, you must install a supported TV card or have a video/TV combo card installed. A complete list of TV and video cards supported by Fedora Core Linux is at http://www.exploits.org/v4l/. See the Gatos Project at http://gatos.sourceforge.net for information on ATI video combo cards.

Freely available Linux support for TV display from video cards that have a TV-out jack is poor. That support must come from the X11 driver, not from a video device that Video4Linux supports with a device driver. Some of the combo TV-tuner/video display cards have support, including the Matrox Marvel, the Matrox Rainbow Runner G-Series, and the RivaTV cards. Many other combo cards lack support, although an independent developer might have hacked something together to support his own card. Your best course of action is to perform a thorough Internet search using Google.

Many of the TV-only PCI cards are supported. In Linux, however, they are supported by the video chipset they use, and not by the name some manufacturer has slapped on a generic board (the same board is typically sold by different manufacturers under different names). The most common chipset is the Brooktree Bt*** series of chips; they are supported by the bttv device driver.

If you have a supported card in your computer, it should be detected during installation. If you add it later, the Kudzu hardware detection utility should detect it and configure it. You can always configure it by hand.

To determine what chipset your card has, use the lspci command to list the PCI device information, find the TV card listing, and look for the chipset that the card uses. For example, the lspci output for our computer shows

 # lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-760 [IGD4-1P] System Controller (rev 13) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-760 [IGD4-1P] AGP Bridge 00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 40) 00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586B PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 1a) 00:07.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 1a) 00:07.4 SMBus: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 40) 00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 02) 00:0b.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 02) 00:0b.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 02) 00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8029(AS) 00:0f.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB12LV23 IEEE-1394 Controller 00:11.0 Network controller: Standard Microsystems Corp [SMC] SMC2602W EZConnect 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV15 [GeForce2 Ti] (rev a4) 

Here, the lines listing the multimedia video controller and multimedia controller say that our TV board uses a Brooktree Bt878 Video Capture chip and a Brooktree Bt878 Audio Capture chip. This card uses the Bt878 chipset. Your results will be different, depending on what card and chipset your computer has. This card happened to be an ATI All-in-Wonder VE (also known as ATI TV-Wonder). (The VE means Value Edition; hence, there is no TV-out connector and no radio chip on the card; what a value!) The name of the chipset tells us that the card uses the bttv driver.

The documentation for the bt878 kernel sound module used for recording sound is found in /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation/sound/ossbtaudio. The documentation for the video driver is found under /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation/video4linux/bttv.

In the documentation directory, we find a file named CARDLIST, and in that file is the following entry, among others:

 card=64 - ATI TV-Wonder VE 

There are 105 cards listed as well as 41 radio cards, including:

 card=0 -  *** UNKNOWN/GENERIC *** 

which is what we would have used had we not known the manufacturer's name for our card.

The file named Modules.conf, located in the same directory, gives us the following example of information to place in our /etc/modules.conf file:

 # i2c alias char-major-89    i2c-dev options i2c-core       i2c_debug=1 options i2c-algo-bit   bit_test=1 # bttv alias char-major-81    videodev alias char-major-81-0  bttv options bttv           card=2 radio=1 options tuner          debug=1 

All we need do is enter this information into /etc/modules.conf and change the value for card=2 to card=64 to match our hardware. We can delete the reference to the radio card (radio=2) because we do not have one and leave the other values alone. Then we must execute

 # depmod -a 

to rebuild the modules dependency list so that all our modules are loaded automatically. When finished, all we need do is execute

 # modprobe bttv 

and our TV card should be fully functional. All the correct modules will be automatically loaded every time we reboot. Fedora is clever enough to detect and configure a supported TV card that is present during installation.

TIP

Other useful documentation can be found in /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation/_video4linux. After you have identified a driver for a device, it will not hurt to look at the source code for it because so little formal documentation exists for many drivers; much of it is in the source code comments.


The development of support for TV cards in Linux has coalesced under the Video4Linux project. The Video4Linux software provides support for video capture, radio, and Teletext devices in Fedora Core.

Video Formats

Fedora recognizes a variety of video formats. The formats created by the MPEG group, Apple, and Microsoft dominate, however. At the heart of video formats are the codecs the encoders and decoders of the video and audio information. These codecs are typically proprietary, but free codecs do exist. Here is a list of the most common video formats and their associated file extensions:

  • .mpeg The MPEG video format; also known as .mpg

  • .qt The QuickTime video format from Apple

  • .mov Another QuickTime video format

  • .avi The Windows audio visual format

TIP

An RPM that provides a DivX codec for Linux can be found at http://www.freshrpms.net/. DivX is a patented MPEG-4 video codec that is the most widely used codec of its type. It allows for compression of MPEG-2 video by a factor of 8. See http://www.divx.com/ for more information.

The GetCodecs application is a Python script with a GUI interface that will download, install, and configure your Fedora system with multimedia codecs not provided by Fedora, such as MP3, DivX and DVD codecs. The script can be obtained from http://sourceforge.net/projects/getcodecs/.


If you need to convert video from one format to another, you use encoder applications called grabbers. These applications take raw video data from a video device such as a camera or TV card, and convert it to one of the standard MPEG formats or to a still image format, such as JPEG or GIF. Fedora does not supply any encoder applications (other than ppmtompeg which encodes MPEG-1 video), but you can find them at http://www.freshrpms.net/ or another online source (see the "Reference" section at the end of this chapter).

Viewing Video in Linux

Because of the patent and licensing issues mentioned earlier, the ability to play video files has been removed from Fedora. This functionality can be restored if you install the full version of the applications described in this section from FreshRPMs at http://www.freshrpms.net/. There, you will find multimedia applications such as Ogle, Xine, AlsaPlayer, Gstreamer, Grip, Mplayer, VCDImager, VideoLAN-client, Xmms, and Zapping.

You can use Linux software to watch TV, save individual images (take snapshots) from a televised broadcast, save a series of snapshots to build animation sequences, or capture video, audio, or both. The following sections describe some of the ways in which you can put Linux multimedia software to work for you.

The noatun viewer is provided with Fedora to use as an embedded viewer in the Konqueror browser. noatun is set up as the default association for the video file formats it plays. Open a video file in Konqueror or Nautilus, and the video will be shown in the viewer if it is supported. The viewer provides basic Start, Stop, and Fast-Forward VCR-type functions.

You can watch MPEG and DVD video with Xine. Xine is a versatile and popular media player that is not included with Fedora. Xine is used to watch AVI, QuickTime, OGG, and MP3 files (the latter disabled in Fedora Core).

Macromedia Flash

The Macromedia Flash plug-in for the Mozilla browser is a commercial multimedia application that isn't provided with Fedora, but many people find it useful. Macromedia Flash enables you to view Flash content at websites that support it. The Mozilla plug-in can be obtained from http://macromedia.mplug.org/. Both .rpm and .tar.gz files are provided.

Download the file for Linux and, if using the .tar.gz file, uncompress it with

 # tar zxvf install_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz 

This produces a directory named flashplayer_installer. Install the plug-in with

 # ./install_flash_player_6_linux/flashplayer-installer 

and follow the screen prompts to install it and make it available to the Mozilla browser.

Having trouble with the Macromedia Flash plugin for Mozilla? Just manually copy the files flashplayer.xpt and libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. An .rpm file for Flash that should install without problems is available from http://macromedia.mplug.org/.


Another interesting video viewer application is MPlayer (not provided by Fedora), a movie player for Linux. MPlayer can use Win32 codecs and it supports a wider range of video formats than Xine, including DivX and some RealMedia files. MPlayer also uses some special display drivers that support Matrox, 3Dfx, and Radeon cards and can make use of some hardware MPEG decoder boards for better MPEG decoding. Look for Fedora packages at http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu/homepage/; a Win32 codec package is also available, as well as other codec packages and a GUI interface.

Viewing Television with Linux

You can configure a number of video input sources to feed television images to your computer. You can use any supported TV device as described previously to connect cable TV, an Xbox, Sega Dreamcast, PS/2, or even an external television antenna to your computer and view the images on your video display.

Fedora provides the tvtime TV viewing application to enable you to watch South Park without leaving your computer.

NOTE

The kdetv application (formerly known as QtVision) is steadily growing in terms of both popularity and features and is worth a look. It can be downloaded from http://www.kdetv.org/.


Start tvtime from the command line:

 $ tvtime & 

Right-clicking on it will toggle the display of the Options menu. Adjust the settings to suit your hardware.

 $ scantv 

The tvtime configuration file details are contained in the man page for tvtime.

An alternative TV-viewing application available at FreshRPMs.Net is Zapping, a GNOME viewer that supports Vide4Linux, Vide4Linux2, and Xvideo and is extensible in functionality through plug-ins. The home page is http://zapping.sourceforge.net/.

Personal Video Recorders

The best reason to attach a television antenna to your computer, however, is to use the video card and the computer as a personal video recorder.

The commercial personal video recorder, TiVo, uses Linux running on a PowerPC processor to record television programming with a variety of customizations. TiVo has a clever interface and wonderful features, including a record/playback buffer, programmed recording and pause, slow motion, and reverse effects. Fedora does not provide any of the many applications that attempt to mimic the TiVo functionality on a desktop PC running Linux. However, several such applications, including DVR, The Linux TV Project, and OpenPVR, are listed at http://www.exploits.org/v4l/. These projects are in development and do not provide .rpm files, so you will need to know how to download from CVS and compile your own binaries. For something a little easier, check out MythTV at http://www.mythtv.org/; a Fedora .rpm file should be available from FreshRPMs.Net.

Linux, TiVo, and PVRs

Some TiVo users say that using this Linux-based device has changed their lives. Indeed, the convenience of using a personal video recorder (PVR) can make life a lot easier for inveterate channel surfers. Although PVR applications are not included with Fedora Core Linux, open-source developers are working on newer and better versions of easy-to-install and easy-to-use PVR software for Linux. For more information about TiVo, which requires a monthly charge and a phone line (or broadband connection with a newer TiVo2), browse to http://www.tivo.com/. Unrepentant Linux hardware hackers aiming to disembowel or upgrade a TiVo can browse to http://www.9thtee.com/tivoupgrades.htm or read the TiVo Hack FAQ at http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/faq.html. A PVR makes viewing television a lot more fun!

A number of Linux sites are devoted to PVR software development. Browse to the DVR project page at http://dvr.sourceforge.net/.


DVD and Video Players

You can now easily play DVDs using Fedora as long as you install the appropriate software. (Fedora doesn't provide any.) Browse to http://www.videolan.org/, and then download, build, and install the vlc client.

You will need a CPU of at least 450MHz and a working sound card to use a DVD player. The default Fedora kernel supports the DVD CD-ROM file system. As mentioned earlier, Xine and MPlayer do a great job of playing DVD files.

NOTE

The VideoLAN HOWTO found at http://videolan.org/ discusses the construction of a network for streaming video. Although you might not want to do that, a great deal of useful information about the software and hardware involved in the enterprise can be generalized for use elsewhere, so it is worth a look. The site also contains a link to a HOWTO about cross-compiling on Linux to produce a Windows binary.


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    Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed
    Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed
    ISBN: 0672327929
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 361

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