Here are some steps for adding DVB support to Totem, most of them pretty straight forward:
- add code in totem-menu.c to detect DVB cards, and show a menu item per card, eg. "Watch TV using 'Supercard 5000'". This should be using HAL and be updated on-the-fly (ie. when the menu's opened at least).
- add a MEDIA_TYPE_DVB type to the backend (not in the playlist parser)
- modify bacon_video_widget_get_mrls() to return a GList*, which would contain a list of "mrls" (media urls) and custom names (so we can name the TV channels), this will be used by the backend (GStreamer/xine-lib) to return a list of fake URLs that'll tune into a specific channel, for a specific card
- make totem-menu.c add those URLs with the custom names to the playlist
- set the playlist playing!

The first item should be pretty much the only thing that will require some efforts, the rest is very straight forward.

Other ideas:
- First time assistant to tune the channels when the card is used for the first time
- remember the last used TV station
- make "totem tv://" (or something similar) work out of the box (see bug 331568 for the DVD one)
- new sidebar item to see the TV schedules (using the over-the-air TV programs) (see bug 349070)
- make "pause" work as expected (time shifting)

*** Bug 400177 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

this mostly works in totem-xine using a channels.conf generated from 'scan', but it would be nice to be able to use the gstreamer dvb source for a similar result.

since "full dvb support" is on the gnome 2.22 roadmap for totem, i'd like to know if this is still valid?
i haven't seen anything related to dvb support in the 2.21.x news files and since i'm about to buy a dvb usb stick soon i'm interested in using totem to watch tv.

i'm talking of course about the gstreamer backend.

Created attachment 104741 [details] [review]
rough patch to add dvb playback support, scanner not in patch

Created attachment 104742 [details] [review]
improved patch, returns correctly from bvw..._can_play

Created attachment 104803 [details]
scanner with basic UI

Here is a scanner with UI. UI is very rough, scanner needs a couple of additions to do DVB-S correctly but works fine with DVB-T and probably also should do scanning in a different thread to the UI thread.

Main UI part done. Untested for now.

2008-02-10  Bastien Nocera  <hadess@hadess.net>

        Patch from Zaheer Abbas Merali <zaheermerali@gmail.com>

        * src/backend/bacon-video-widget-gst-0.10.c:
        (bacon_video_widget_get_channels_file),
        (bacon_video_widget_can_play),
        (bacon_video_widget_dvb_get_adapter_type),
        (bacon_video_widget_get_mrls):
        Add support for listing DVB channels from the channels.conf
        file, with DVB type-specific filtering

        * src/totem-menu.c: (on_play_dvb_activate),
        (update_drives_menu_items), (update_dvb_menu_items),
        (on_movie_menu_select): Add DVB cards to the Movie menu

I'm not sure I'll be able to add the UI as it is in Totem, before the freeze. So I'll just provide a nice message instead, and try to get someone to fix the scanner's UI. Probably best to do that in a different bug though.

I moved the scanner UI bits to bug 515759.

There's a tracker bug for DVB at bug 515764.