I’m Casandro from Germany, I’m not a member of your hackerspace, but of the Bavarian “Binary Kitchen”. I’m on a self-inflicted quest to collect all still active teletext services.
I collect most teletext from my balcony where I have a fairly large satellite setup. It allows me to get teletext from a variety of different countries. Unfortunately there seem to be some Dutch teletext services not available on satellite. The one of Oemrop West is a particular example.
Therefore I’m wondering if I could put a little collection node in your space. I would of course provide the hardware and remotely manage it. The smallest solution would be a Raspberry PI Zero with a DVB-T hat and some antenna. If you want to use the setup, which will include a tvheadend instance for your own projects, I could upgrade that to a small form factor PC with proper PCI-E DVB cards. (Of course I wouldn’t mind also sponsoring satellite equipment, but the buildup would be more elaborate)
Would anybody be interested in such a project? It would certainly be something for next year, as 39c3 is approaching.
Interesting project! I can’t speak for the board or the space in general but I think that we want to keep all infra under our own control.
I think it would be interesting for us to know how we can receive Omroep West’s teletext ourself, what hardware would we need? I assume an usb rtl-sdr / dvb stick would suffice as well? I think I found the tvheadend plugin needed to receive teletext with that information we could attempt to receive some teletext and join the fun
I can, of course, hand over the control of the hardware. That’s no problem for me,
Essentially I use tvheadend as a kind of “middleware”. It takes care of finding new DVB-muxes as well as managing access to those transponders.
The software which actually takes care of the Teletext is this one:
It access tvheadend via HTTP, getting the transponder lists and the data from the transponders. I need to refactor how the uploads work. Currently this works via rsync. As well as how service lists work.
Cable could work, but I don’t know how cable in the Netherlands works. In Germany it works via DVB-C, while, for example, Portugal uses DVB-T. Though Teletext can be encrypted in theory, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any station actually doing so. (maybe except for RTL4/RTL5 on analogue, but that was a special case, strictly speaking they were not encrypted)
What hardware is needed depends on the standard, though “semi-professional” PCI-E cards can do both DVB-T(2) as well as DVB-C… and often even ATSC (US) or ISDB (Japan).
Cable could work, but I don’t know how cable in the Netherlands works.
The main cable provider is Ziggo, which provides quite a lot of channels without encryption. That should include Omroep West as well (source, the ‘kabel tv’ plan is fully encryption-free and available to all customers).
I’m not sure if revspace is a Ziggo customer, but if they are that would be the easiest option to capture the data.
Omroep West is on DVB-T, and can be received without a subscription, because it’s part of the public broadcasting system, so a dvb-t stick could work, might need to look for a proper position for the aerial.
I have a Raspberry Pi Zero and a DVB-T HAT laying around collecting dust. If anyone wants to try out if there’s something useful to collect using that from RevSpace they can borrow that, saves the hassle of getting hardware in from Germany
Very cool. Well the software currently isn’t quite ready for public deployment yet. It relies on accessing a webservice inside my VPN (without auth) as well as rsyncing data to a public server, but if anybody wants to try it, it’s on github. (see above)
For my software you first need to compile the C program in the src subdirectory, then the software dealing with the high level stuff is in tools/tvheadend. There’s also a translations.json file to translate in between DVB-service names and teletext names.
If anybody is interested in it, we could meet at 39c3. Or we could do a virtual workshop on how to get raw data out of tvheadend. Or I could come to your space sometime in February. (I’ll be in Düsseldorf then, so hopping over Leidschendam is much more feasible)
I have heard of that, but it’s actually a very “slimmed down” version of that service. For example NOS uses Level 2.5 features of teletext, namely coloured full page backgrounds. AFAIK those ssh services cannot even provide double height text. It would be just as limited and “garbled” as those “web”-based interfaces to it.
Not anymore they do. They rewrote their entire backend two years ago:
Before that I wrote a bash/unicode teletekst reader:
Before the rewrite, their web/json implementation did return <span> elements with class=doubleHeight. Which I couldn’t render so I ignored those. I had to write a regex to do so. They used those on the headers of news articles, but not anymore. They also had a bunch of test pages somewhere (I forgot the numbers) and those are gone too.
To me it seems that their new teletext implementation is a lot simpler than their old one. But I haven’t had access to proper analog broadcast TV for many years, so I wouldn’t know if those things are still there on the ‘proper’ Teletext.
I don’t have access to any TV service at home, and I don’t even know which of the modern digital TV services offer teletext, and if so, how these transport the Teletext to your TV.
As a Flutter (cross platform app development framework) app developer, and fan of open source with special interest in archiving projects, I’d like to offer my help creating an decent open source Teletext stream viewer if necessary.
I’m willing to take ownership of this. @casandro how do you imagine the logistics? That SFF PC with tvheadend setup for other project usage sounds interesting!
