Watch TV with Linux

David M Williams
Monday, 06 October 2008 12:25

Opinion and Analysis

tvtime is a SourceForge-hosted open source application. It is committed to providing the best high quality live TV viewer experience for Linux possible.

It’s important to note tvtime does not support recording, or playback of recorded streams. It is not a PVR system. This may change in the future but at the moment it is not part of the tvtime scope because of the specific goal the developers have set for themself.

This restriction isn’t necessarily a disadvantage because the developers genuinely are pouring effort into making a gorgeous television experience.

The software deinterlaces every field, it renders composited text with crisp fonts, it displays closed captions with a high quality font for maximum readability and employs other features all geared to giving the best output.

MythTV and tvtime aren’t the only choices by any means. Other media centre applications include xawtv which is also a popular choice, Zapping for the GNOME desktop environment and kwintv for the KDE desktop environment. These come with a mixture of different capabilities.

In fact, depending on your requirements, you can also work with the basic media playing applications themselves. Power users might like this route, funnelling television through the regular tools they may use.

This may also be of interest to people with large displays who would like to have a simple windowed television display in a corner of their monitor while they work on other things. If you’d like to try it, you can find instructions here to use the versatile VLC video player for this purpose.

Interestingly, the author of that site indicates he explored VLC because while MythTV offered all the TV watching and recording features he wanted, he also wanted to work on his computer at the same time and felt a trimmed down player was a better choice for his needs than a full-scale media centre app.

No matter which way you go, Linux has a choice for you. You can watch (and record) television on your computer – while working, or as the family high-definition media centrepiece. You can do it without any software cost and, apart from the price of an appropriate video card and TV tuner, you possibly don’t even have to spend a cent on hardware either.