Free gshow tv software for linux

GShow TV is a TV program schedule viewer and a Personal Video Recorder GUI. The basic purpose of GShow TV is to provide a nice GUI for viewing tv program schedule information and for recording the programs.

GShow TV doesnt itself do the recording of the selected programs, rather it uses any PVR solution that exists. GShow TV is globally usable as it uses XMLTV to access the program schedules, and xmltv has support for multitude of countries. (mid 2004 support for Canada, the USA, the UK, Germany, Austria, Finland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Denmark, Japan, Sweden, France, Norway, Portugal and Romania)

The interface between the recording software and the GUI is two trivial shell scripts, which are of course modifiable by the user as they see fit. The reason why this separation is simple: On linux almost everybody who has a TV card on their computer uses a different recording solution.

The multitude of home made recording systems is countless. However, most home made systems dont include a nice GUI and hence GShow TV. GShow TV uses XMLTV for its tv listing. GShow TV can be used as a TV Guide without its recording functionality.

GLTV is a tv viewing application written using OpenGL and SDL. It is designed to have an easy method of adding good looking on screen display (OSD) elements. Eventually i plan on adding support for XMLTV tv listings, so you can see whats on currently, and browse the tv listings from within the program, but i am currently just adding support for the basics, and trying to make the general look of the OSD nice. It uses alpha blending and double buffered reads, so you probably have to have a decent video card and cpu to run it well (it takes 50% of my tbird 1.2ghz machine (but only 1-2% of my 1.5gb of ram). it also uses a lot of textures (the video is a texture mapped onto a quad) so you might need to have a fair amount of video memory (i have a GeForce 2 gts with 32mb of ram, and it runs at a good speed).

It requires: a video4linux (1) capture card, OpenGL, Freetype 2, SDL and XMLwrapp. Theoretically, any v4l capture card should work, but i am using a bttv based one (Hauppauge, bt878), so it might not work too well with other cards, or cards using other drivers. If you are using another card and have success or problems with it, let me know so I can fix them if there is a problem (or add them to a list of known supported drivers).

Note: you must have a file called .gltvrc in your home directory. For an example with the default options, look at gltvrc.default in the source directory.

xawtv started as TV application for the bttv driver, because the Motif-based "xtvscreen" was the only TV application at this time. Alot has changed since:
- The xawtv and bttv driver switched over to the video4linux interface.
- Support for more interfaces was added: Xvideo Extention, the new video4linux2 interface and BSD Family video grabber driver (bktr).
- xawtv isnt a single application any more, it is a small suite of video4linux related software, with video recording capabilities and serveral useful command line tools.
- In the future even more hardware will be supported, the current development snapshots already have DVB support for example.
Main features:
xawtv
- of course, it is still the main application, for watching TV.
motv
- a new, IMHO better, TV application with a Motif-based GUI.
mtt
- a teletext browser, also uses Motif. This one works on a terminal too.
pia
- a simple movie player.
fbtv
- is a TV application for the linux console, it uses a framebuffer devices to display the video.
streamer
- a command line tool for recording movies.
v4lctl
- a command line tool to set video4linux parameters (tune in some channel, set TV norm, ...).
scantv
- a command line tool to do a channel scan.
radio
- a simple, curses-based radio app.
webcam
- captures images and uploads them to a Web-Server via ftp or ssh in a endless loop.
alevtd
- a http server for videotext pages, so you can watch read videotext with a webbrowser.
- Most of the apps share the xawtv config file (~/.xawtv).

TVNow is a program that displays the North American satellite and network TV Listings that are provided by the TVNOW company.

Free listings for the weekend are available and subscriptions for yearly listing are very
low cost.

Written in Python 1.5.2 with Glade using the Pygtk interface. All of these things may already be included on your distribution (they are included in the RedHat 7.0 Linux distribution).

A console-only version is included which is useful for sight-impaired people using the speakup voice synthesizer system.

GAIMnOSD is a plugin for GAIM allowing to print events outside of any windows in TV menu style. The plugin uses the XOSD library for output.

GAIMnOSD project allows setting the size, position and the color of the notification messages.

KatchTV is an "Internet TV" application for KDE. KatchTV makes it easy to subscribe to "TV" channels from all over the internet in the form of podcasts, so that you can browse channels, download shows, and watch them, all from one convenient interface.

KatchTV is very similar to Democracy TV, but focuses on KDE integration, using KHTMLPart and embedded players such as kaffeine. Its much faster, and lighter on resources if you run a KDE desktop without GTK apps.

Installation is easy, as long as your distro has PyKDE, PyQt, and Kaffeine. Just untar to some directory like /usr/local, and run the KatchTV program. You can also make a symlink to that executable from a directory like /usr/local/bin, and KatchTV will work out where to find its files.

Comments welcome; let me know if youve any problems using it.

For the ZKM installation "Digital Body Automata" a realtime "blue-screen" driver software was used to build an interactive videowall made out of 16 TVs with interactive content on 12 of the screens.

System components were:

- 2x 8 TV screens arranged in a row on each side of the mural
- 5 Pentium200 PCs with 3 Matrox VGA video cards each and a Matrox Meteor framegrabber card
- 4 cameras imaging a red cloth screen below the TVs
- multiple VGA-to-TV converters, video splitters, cables, etc.
- RedHat Linux and custom X-Server that supports 3 video cards (needed at the time)

The TVs shows a cover image (stone texture). When the observer enters the space, a virtual shadow is cast onto the TVs revealing a detailed image underneath. The "shadow" is calculated from the obscured red sloth in the image path of the tiny wide-angle cameras hidden below the TVs.

episoder is a tool to tell you when new episodes of your favourite TV shows are airing. episoder does so by parsing online TV show episode guides.
Currently episoder can parse the tv.com website thus it tells you whenever a new episode of a show listed on tv.com is aired.
Enhancements:
- Some parsing issues for certain shows were fixed.