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The Linux distillery Watch TV with Linux
The Linux distillery Watch TV with Linux | Watch TV with Linux |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 06 October 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 With any Linux distro installed, connect your computer up to the TV input and the video output to your television, or monitor. You will be able to boot the computer and see it working. However, without some more software you can’t do anything as yet with the TV tuner. Here are some very good programs to give the TV viewing and recording experience we want.Featured Whitepaper
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MythTV offers what we want, namely the basic live TV functionality permitting you to watch television, along with PVR facilities to pause, rewind and fast forward the TV signal. MythTV also supports multiple tuner cards – so if you connect more than one you can record one channel while watching another, or record two different shows at once while you are away. Even if you are only watching one channel MythTV can take advantage of multiple tuners to give picture-in-picture functionality. Additional features include some games, a web-based interface to easily manage your scheduled recordings, automatic advertisement detection and trimming, recording shows to DVD and a free integrated television guide (which may not work in all regions.) MythTV is remarkably lightweight at just 13.57MB for the essential binaries. It can be downloaded directly or installed via your regular package manager. Alternatively, you can also find at least three MythTV-specific Linux distributions which pre-package the OS and software all-in-one installation. This includes KnoppMyth, MythDora and MythBuntu which are based on, as you might guess, Knoppix, Fedora and Ubuntu Linux distributions. MythTV is very good, but at the same time it can be a complex system. There are two essential parts to the product, namely a server component and a client component. The principle is sound: you can have multiple clients all about your house – or even connected via the Internet – working from the one server. The clients can view recorded content, schedule recordings and watch live TV. With a few old computers you could realistically have a media centre in every bedroom even with just one TV input into the house. On the other hand, if you just wish to set up one single computer and don’t need a client/server configuration you might find MythTV overkill. This is also true if you don’t want a dedicated box – you may be just interested in periodically watching TV on your existing Linux desktop or laptop with a plugin USB TV tuner and just want a simple run-on-demand program. In these cases, here is an option for you. CONTINUED |
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