DvbTv — DVB-T live TV on Windows

A clean, native Windows app that watches digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T) from a cheap RTL2832U USB stick, written in C# / .NET 9 (WinForms).

It talks to the RTL2832U's built-in hardware DVB-T demodulator over WinUSB, gets a ready MPEG-TS stream, and plays it with LibVLC using GPU decode (NVDEC / d3d11va). Architecture is dependency-injected (.NET Generic Host) with Serilog logging from line one, so debugging is reading a log — not guessing.

Features

• 📺 Live DVB-T TV — tune, lock, and play terrestrial channels.
• 🔎 Channel scan — UHF sweep with SI/PSI parsing → real service names (PAT/SDT).
• 📡 Live signal status bar — frequency, signal %, quality %, SNR (dB), BER, lock state.
• 🗓️ EPG — a now/next window and a weekly grid, fed live from the EIT. The now/next view auto-tracks the current programme.
• 💬 Subtitles / closed captions — DVB bitmap subs and teletext subs.
• 🔊 Volume controls — mute / down / up, persisted across channel changes.
• 🖥️ Fullscreen (F11 / double-click), app icon, channel list, control bar.
• ⚡ GPU decode — NVDEC via d3d11va; the CPU only does TS/PID parsing.

Hardware

• An RTL2832U USB stick (VID 0x0BDA, PID 0x2838), typically paired with an R820T/R820T2 tuner.
• The stick must be bound to WinUSB (e.g. via Zadig), not the vendor BDA driver, so the app can talk to it directly with libusb.
• The chip's on-board demodulator is DVB-T only (not DVB-T2).

A legacy DirectShow / BDA tuner backend is also included (Tv:Tuner = "Bda" in appsettings.json) for sticks left on the vendor driver. The stick is WinUSB xor BDA.

See HARDWARE.md for the full device probe and broadcast-standard notes.

Build & run

Requires the .NET 9 SDK (the project targets net9.0-windows, x64).

dotnet build -c Debug
bin\Debug\net9.0-windows\DvbTv.exe

libusb-1.0.dll ships next to the executable. For LibVLC, the VideoLAN.LibVLC.Windows NuGet package places the native runtime under libvlc/ in the output folder automatically.

Pre-built release

A self-contained Windows x64 build (no .NET install needed) is published under Releases — unzip and run DvbTv.exe.

Architecture

RTL2832U stick :  RF → COFDM demod  →  MPEG-TS     [hardware on the stick, ~0% CPU]
WinUSB / libusb:  USB bulk → TS, PID parsing       [trivial CPU]
LibVLCSharp    :  TS → H.264/MPEG-2 decode → NVDEC [GPU]
                  decoded frame → D3D11 render      [GPU, zero-copy]

Every layer sits behind an interface (IDvbTuner, IVideoPlayer, IChannelScanner, IChannelStore, ITvController) and is wired with DI. See ARCHITECTURE.md.

License

MIT © 2026 Pantelis.

This software uses LibVLC (via LibVLCSharp, LGPL-2.1) and libusb (LGPL-2.1). DVB-T reception of free-to-air broadcasts only.