ZapDvb is a software solution for DVB radio and television (sat, cable and terrestrial) that covers life viewing (or listening), various types of recording, lossless and fast MPEG II video editing and the integration of player tools to play previously recorded material or CDs and DVDs. ZapDvb includes a simple GUI that integrates it with KDE or GNOME. Recommended players are MPlayer and mpg123. Others like Xine and Kaffeine are supported. ZapDvb itself does not include a player!
You will also need a DVB card for life DVB viewing (or listening) and recording. A working version of the www.linuxtv.org drivers must be installed. Even the current (still preliminary) documentation contains a lot of information on technical details and how to install or configure player software or the drivers.
This software is very easy
to install or to compile! It does not depend on lots of
strange packets (because the players are not part of
ZapDvb itself). SuSE 9.1 ... SuSE 9.3 users can
install the provided RPM, the SuSE DVDs contain all other required
packages. ZapDvb was also tested on Debian Sarge
and Knoppix. For these systems deb packages are provided.
SuSE 9.1 Remark #1: the DVB drivers that came with 9.1 are outdated
and do not support some DVB cards.
SuSE 9.1 Remark #2: the Xine version the came with 9.1 is outdated.
Get something newer or try MPlayer.
SuSE 9.3 Remark #3: the original DVD came without MPEG or MP3
support, updates are available via SuSE or Packman.
Debian (Testing): Patch suspend2 into the 2.6.14 kernel - save to
disk is becomming usable (cifs gets broken by this).
ZapDvb is an integration tool that lets you build Media Control Center solutions (see zapmcc) that scale from server functionality over workstation usage to a set-top box application. It makes use of well known tools where ever it can and does not try to reinvent the wheel. The whole thing is scriptable and there is no monster GUI application. A couple of command lines tools are available (and are internally used), but as a KDE integration is provided, these are usually not visible to the user. KDE users will find some .desktop files to run ZapDvb tools or zapmcc in the KDE Multimedia Menu. Running in set-top box mode should make the application and your system child safe. A family mode supports using ZapDvb from multiple accounts while minimising conflicts between users.
Currently there are two restrictions: (1) there exists some documentation but not yet enough and (2) the GUI is currently based on kdialog and not very comfortable - although all important functions can be used via this GUI. Future releases will contain improvements for both points.
See the Download Page for the sources and/or the binaries for SuSE 9.x or Debian/Knoppix. Modem or ISDN users will be lucky, as the downloads files are quite small (typically around 300 kBytes).
The process of build, installation and configuration is described in detail in a set of essential HTML documents - see README. Starting with version 0.50 the user level documentation will come as an optional package (to reduce the download size).
Currently ZapDvb contains three important command line utilities:
Internally the following additional tools are used: zapdvb_cut (MPEG Editor), zapdvb_job (Managing atd and cron Jobs) and zapdvb_box (Set-top Box Startup). There is no need to call the internal tools directly, see zapmcc. For historic reasons there is a tool called zapcut, which is compatible to the 0.2x versions of ZapDvb (zapcut will be removed from future versions of this software).