3.14. Radio

This section is about how to enable listening to radio from a V4L-compatible radio tuner. See the man page for a description of radio options and keyboard controls.

3.14.1. Usage tips

The full listing of the options is available in the manual page. Here are just a few tips:

  • Make sure your tuner works with another radio software in Linux, for example XawTV.

  • Use the channels option. An example:

    -radio channels=104.4-Sibir,103.9-Maximum

    Explanation: With this option, only the 104.4 and 103.9 radio stations will be usable. There will be a nice OSD text upon channel switching, displaying the channel's name. Spaces in the channel name must be replaced by the "_" character.

  • There are several ways of capturing audio. You can grab the sound either using your sound card via an external cable connection between video card and line-in, or using the built-in ADC in the saa7134 chip. In the latter case, you have to load the saa7134-alsa or saa7134-oss driver.

  • MEncoder cannot be used for audio capture, because it requires a video stream to work. So your can either use arecord from ALSA project or use -ao pcm:file=file.wav. In the latter case you will not hear any sound (unless you are using a line-in cable and have switched line-in mute off).

3.14.2. Examples

Input from standard V4L (using line-in cable, capture switched off):

mplayer radio://104.4

Input from standard V4L (using line-in cable, capture switched off, V4Lv1 interface):

mplayer -radio driver=v4l radio://104.4

Playing second channel from channel list:

mplayer -radio channels=104.4=Sibir,103.9=Maximm radio://2

Passing sound over the PCI bus from the radio card's internal ADC. In this example the tuner is used as a second sound card (ALSA device hw:1,0). For saa7134-based cards either the saa7134-alsa or saa7134-oss module must be loaded.

mplayer -rawaudio rate=32000 radio://2/capture \
    -radio adevice=hw=1.0:arate=32000:channels=104.4=Sibir,103.9=Maximm

Note

When using ALSA device names colons must be replaced by equal signs, commas by periods.