Kbtv is a small TV viewing application for KDE/FreeBSD, mostly written in Python. It supports BrookTree (Conexant) based TV cards (bktr driver) and as of 1.0 (April 2006) also Philips SAA713x based TV cards (saa driver from purpe.com). As of version 1.0.1 (May 2006) it also supports the Philips/Logitech based webcams that work with the pwcbsd driver from raaf.atspace.org.
Kbtv comes with an admin oriented utility btsetup that can be used to set permissions and ownership right, setup your system to automatically load the bktr and/or the saa and/or the pwc module, and the snd_driver module upon rebooting. It can also add users to the TV operator group.
If you have a supported capture card without a tuner, you can still use Kbtv to display composite video, for example from a satellite receiver, and connect the audio source to your capture card's line-in (if it has one) or one of your soundcard's line inlets. For video displaying, Kbtv uses SDL. Release 1.2 features saa tuning improvements, integrated rendering (no more stand-alone apps for bktr and saa rendering), and smoother changing of rendering size and driver. The latest releases 1.2.1 to 1.2.4 are mainly bugfix releases.
Kbtv consists of several non-GUI modules (starting with bt*) that can be used as-is as a framework for another app or for lower-level operations. The GUI modules (starting with kbtv_*) use the PyKDE (and PyQt) bindings. The saa code is included with Kbtv for convenience (Kbtv has build time configuration switches for tuner type and broadcast standard, but it does not use the saa support code for tuning anymore as of version 1.1.2). Please see the README file more more details about saa.
Likewise, currently the pwcbsd driver code is also included with Kbtv (there's also a FreeBSD port for it), as there is a build-time requirement for its code. Please see the README file more more details about pwc.
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