Capturing Radio

One cool feature of many TV capture cards is the ability to hook up an FM antenna and listen to the radio. There is plenty of support for listening to live radio. But as for capturing the radio, there isn't much support. However, as with anything, if there is a will, there is a way. This isn't really anything new, if you compare it to using a cassette tape player to record the radio. What is novel is the ability to gather and store radio like a DVR (or in my case, on my DVR) - all nice and scheduled and automated.

There are, of course, legal aspects. However, as with a DVR, the loophole is the personal use portion which allows fair use of copyright material.

We like a number of children's radio dramas, such as Adventures in Odyssey and Paws and Tales. We'd like to listen to them, but our time in the car doesn't work out right and we usually miss the beginning or the end. Plus, when going on a long trip it would be nice to have a number of them to listen to between songs.

The ivtv-radio command has the ability to tune the PVR-150, so I've written some scripts to allow me to capture on any given FM frequency for a given length. Then using a standard cronjob I've added the recording of these and transcoding to Ogg [?]. Now they're available on our home DVR and accessible to any other networked device at our home. For on-the-go use, all we have to do is connect our Sansa music players (running Rockbox for Ogg and much more support) or cell phones to a PC, and drag and drop the files over.