Sunday, December 23, 2007

Install Kalva in Kubuntu Gutsy



I record TV show in Linux using Kalva. It's much lighter than using something like mythtv or other similar application. I like the fact that Kalva behave like a typical computer application instead of operating like some kind of TV or VCR.

Anyway, now that I upgrade my home pc to Gutsy, I need to hand-build it again since it's not an app that is available through standard repository. It take some time for me to gather and redo things needed to make it working again, so I figure this time it would be useful to summarize some notes.

Some prerequisites to get the source built and running :
  • The most obvious one : a working TV Tuner. I have kdetv running, so no problem here.
  • The second obvious one : Development environment like gcc, make, etc..
  • CheckInstall to make installing from source less dirty
  • QT and KDE development files.
  • MPlayer and Mencoder.
  • Perl module that handle Cron automation (Config::Crontab), use CPAN for easy setup for it. See the detail here, it's in germany but you only need to look for the perl's CPAN command below.
Post installation (running) quirks :
  • The configuration page does not seem to store the change. For example, I've setup the video to use v4l2 but it still use v4l in command debug window. However, change the config files "~/.kde/share/apps/kalva" manually in text editor works for now.
  • The Movie List Window (one-time recording) does not show the scheduled recording although "peeking" using atq show that it is already added to the system. After some cursing, hair-pulling, debugging and fixing, change part of tvapp.pm file into below, fixed it.
235:   foreach ( @jobs )  {
236: $job = $_;
237:
238: $jobid = $job;
239: $jobid =~ s/\s.*//g;
240: #print "$jobid";
241:
242: #$cmd = `at -c "$_" | tail -2 | head -1`;
243: $cmd = `at -c "$jobid" | tail -2 | head -1`;
244: $cmd =~ s/\n//g;
Kalva is not an app that is majorly supported, so using it require me to get some hand dirty a little bit. I think it's worth it though.

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