"ERROR: cannot parse" when running scan - solution found

[madprofessor]

Hi all.

In the hope that this is useful to someone (as I'd seen these errors in a few questions posted to the forum) ...

I had these errors when trying to scan for channels:

Code: Select all

root@myth-hp:~# scan -x0 /usr/share/dvb/dvb-s/Astra-28.2E 2>&1 | head -n 20
scanning /usr/share/dvb/dvb-s/Astra-28.2E
using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0'
ERROR: cannot parse'[CHANNEL]
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    DELIVERY_SYSTEM = DVBS2
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    FREQUENCY = 11719500
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    POLARIZATION = HORIZONTAL
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    SYMBOL_RATE = 29500000
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    INNER_FEC = 3/4
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    MODULATION = QPSK
'
ERROR: cannot parse'    INVERSION = AUTO
'
ERROR: cannot parse'[CHANNEL]
'

What I discovered after some digging:

The scan utility from dvb-apps / dvb-tools expects “initial tuning data” files in the old format (one line per transponder, like 11719500:H:29500).

But the file I was using (/usr/share/dvb/dvb-s/Astra-28.2E) is in the new v5 format (INI-style with [CHANNEL] sections and key=value pairs).

scan doesn’t understand that newer format, so it just throws cannot parse errors.

So I used dvbv5-scan instead of scan. On Ubuntu 24, I installed this with "apt install dvb-tools"