mycroes

There's always time to play

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Watching TV with mplayer

Occassionally I want to watch something on my computer, and currently I'm using mplayer to do so. When I finally was able to play video and sound at the same time, I decided I wanted to have a bit easier way to watch tv then constantly searching for my mplayer command. So I made a small shell script, and while I was at it I added in the channel list so I can just start watching without searching frequencies too, so here it is:
#!/bin/bash

#OPTS="-fs"
FILTER="-vf pp=lb,crop=672:420"
OUTPUT="-vo gl -ao pulse"

CHANNELS="768000-Nederland_1,\
776000-Nederland_2,\
784000-Nederland_3,\
752000-RTL_4,\
744000-RTL_5,\
736000-SBS_6,\
728000-RTL_7,\
712000-Veronica,\
704000-Net_5,\
496000-Discovery_Channel"

TV="-tv outfmt=i420:chanlist=europe-west:width=720:height=576:amode=1:alsa:adevice=hw.2,0:forceaudio:immediatemode=0:channels=$CHANNELS"

mplayer $OPTS $FILTER $OUTPUT $TV tv://$1

As you can see I'm using the first argument as channel, so you can invoke this script with a channel number to immediately select a channel on startup, but leaving out the argument will just start mplayer on the first channel.

Last but not least, you can switch channels by binding keys to tv_step_channel 1 and tv_step_channel -1, in Ubuntu these are bound to h and l by default, and I suspect this to be the upstream default.