3.14. Radio
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## 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.

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