Dvbscan

Note: The correct title of this article is dvbscan. It appears incorrectly here due to technical restrictions.

dvbscan is a basic command-line utility to produce a set of channel configuration. It emits this information to stdout.

Usage

dvbscan does not do a full-spectrum frequency scan. In order to get information on the multiplexes available, it reads this information from an existing transport. So you have to feed it this information; happily, the source distribution comes with a handy selection of transport settings for most of the available transmitters.

You should find it in the directory /usr/local/share/dvb/scan/dvb-[cst]/. The name gives the country and location; for example, au-Adelaide refers to Adelaide, South Australia. To be sure, look at the beginning of the file, which should look something like this:

# Australia / Adelaide / Mt Lofty
# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy
# ABC
T 226500000 7MHz 3/4 NONE QAM64 8k 1/16 NONE

In this example, the first line gives country, town and transmitter location.

The simplest use is (for example, running from the source folder)

dvbscan dvb-t/uk-[[Winter Hill]] > channels.conf

Tzap and its siblings require a channels.conf file placed in their user config folder to operate.

There are a slew of options for those with extra DVB devices, those wanting to use VDR and for filtering radio stations and encrypted channels.