pidvbip

DVB-over-IP set-top box software for the Raspberry Pi.

It requires Tvheadend running on a server (or on same pi)

https://github.com/tvheadend/

GPU memory should be a minimum of 128MB in config.txt

gpu_mem=128

Screenshots

Building

The platform being used to develop pidvbip is Raspbian

pidvbip requires the following dependencies:

libmpg123-dev libfaad-dev liba52-dev libavahi-client-dev libfreetype6-dev libftgl-dev

MPEG-2 decoding

pidvbip will detect whether the MPEG-2 hardware codec is enabled, and fall back to software decoding otherwise. Software MPEG-2 only works well on higher powered pi (pi3/4).

Usage

There are three ways for pidvbip to locate the tvheadend server:

1. Using avahi. To do this you need to ensure that tvheadend is compiled with avahi support and avahi-daemon is running on both the machine running tvheadend and the Pi running pidvbip.

2. Via the config file /boot/pidvbip.txt If avahi fails to locate a server, pidvbip will look in this file. The first line of this file must contain the hostname and port, separated by a space.

3. Via the command line - e.g. ./pidvbip mypc 9982

As soon as pidvbip starts it will connect to tvheadend, download the channel list and all EPG data, and then tune to the first channel in your channel list and start playing.

You can optionally specify a channel number as a third parameter to skip directly to that channel (only when also specifying the host and port on the command-line).

Once running, the following keys are mapped to actions:

'q' - quit
'0' to '9' - direct channel number entry
'n' - next channel
'p' - previous channel
'i' - show/hide current event information
'h' - toggle auto-switching to HD versions of programmes from an SD channel
' ' - pause/resume playback
'c' - display list of channels and current events to the console        
    - Also shows basic onscreen channel listing, whilst onscreen use
    - d for down a screen of channels, or u for up a screen of channels in listing
's' - Take a screenshot (filename is ~/pidvbip-NNNNNNNNNNN.ppm)

pidvbip currently supports hardware decoding of H264 and MPEG-2 video streams, and software decoding of MPEG, AAC and A/52 (AC-3) audio streams. Multi-channel audio streams are downmixed to Stereo.

Bugs

pidvbip is still very early software and many things don't work or are not implemented yet. See the file BUGS for more information.

Copyright

(C) Dave Chapman 2012

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.