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Can You Get a DAB Radio with an EPG and Record Function? (bestradios.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/dabradio

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I really like the idea of treating the radio like a #MythTV PVR -- to browse a schedule, prioritize programs and have them automatically recorded. But this article is bad news. It says the devices that could do this have been discontinued.

Is that still true? The article is 4 years old.

In principle, a DAB+ radio should be a network appliance. Just like Silicondust makes TV tuners with cat5 ethernet connections, it would be useful to have a DAB+ tuner that’s cat5 attached so software can present the schedule on a big screen and schedule recordings. Doesn’t exist, does it?

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[–] i_am_not_a_robot 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think there's even an EPG broadcast anymore except on the BBC mux.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Woah, that’s a bummer. I would naturally expect a DAB broadcaster to make use of the metadata bandwidth to publish their scheduling. So are you saying most of the stations just neglect to send the metadata?

It looks like the radioEPG standard is 10 years old. Which could be an indicator that it’s a dying technology.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It is sent as a data channel. I didn't realise at the point I wrote that, that you are in Brussels. The two Brussels muxes look like they have EPG data broadcast so you might be ok - if you can find a radio which displays it! I know my car does but that's the only time I've seen EPG data.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some of the radios have a tiny color LCD screen which seems quite impractical for viewing a schedule. I suppose it only shows what is playing now. I noticed there are some DAB USB sticks, but I don’t suppose there is any linux software that can extract the schedule and organize recordings.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's very few for DAB. I use https://github.com/JvanKatwijk/dab-cmdline which should be able to extract the EPG data stream - but not the data itself. I don't know what format it is in, it might be easy to parse.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just noticed “EPG detection and building up a time table” on this page which seems to be the same guy as the repo you just linked.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot 2 points 1 year ago

A typical action is to switch to a certain service in a given channel, another action is to dump the audio of the selected service into a file, stopping the dump, to halt the program, to dump the text the the Dynamic Label into a file, to dump the FIC data into a file, or to do nothing.

So it looks like you can probably use that as an EPG and recorder for DAB(+)!