InterWeb Task Force

If you have a DVB card in your system, an alternative to the NTP protocol is to use the time signal delivered over the DVB signal. If you have a Linux PVR set up, then I strongly advise using the DVB time signal instead of NTP to ensure you are synchronised with your DTV providers time, to help ensure you dont drop any bits at the beginning or end of the recording. These DVB time signals are usually synchronised with an atomic clock (depending on DTV provider) so are highly accurate.

In Ubuntu this is easy to set up. First check your timezone is correctly configured in system settings (System->Administration->Time and Date), then open a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and run the following:

sudo apt-get install dvb-tools

sudo dvbdate -sf

This will set your system clock to the current DVB stream time. Its then worth setting up a Cron Job to run once a day to keep your system clock well synchronised:

sudo su -
cd /etc/cron.hourly
gedit dvbdate

You should get a text editor on your screen which you should copy and paste the following into:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/dvbdate -sqf

Click File->Save and then File->Quit. You should now be back in your terminal window where we make this file ‘executable’ to finish off the configuration

chmod 755 /etc/cron.hourly/dvbdate
exit
exit

Your system will not be kept synchronised with your DTV providers time every hour. Hope you found this article useful!