11.1. Radio input

11.1. Radio input

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.

11.1.1. Compilation

1. First, you have to recompile MPlayer using ./configure with --enable-radio and (if you want capture support) --enable-radio-capture.

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

11.1.2. Usage tips

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

• 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).

11.1.3. 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.