What software is available to use TV tuner card?

Question

I am looking for software programs to use my TV Tuner card in Ubuntu. I have mythTV installed and use it quite a bit. But I am looking for a program that can tune my tuner card in just a window, not only a full-screen.

E.g. - I would like to watch something in a browser, while having a TV channel playing in another window. Maybe a program like VLC that can control my tuner?

Solution 1

You're requesting to watch TV with VLC - well it is possible. See this answer.

• TV with VLC

Else some illustrations of the other applications:

• TV with Me-TV

• TV with Kaffeine

Solution 2

Me TV is a pretty decent under-appreciated application for DVB-* devices.

Has an EPG, even recording facilities. Much, much lighter than MythTV.

sudo apt-get install me-tv

Solution 3

MythTV can also be configured to run in a window. In the MythTV Frontend, go to Setup > Appearance and the first screen should look similar to the screen below. You can set the size of the menu here, and also if you want the playback to use the same size area. Setting the window border option will add or remove the window border, and setting fixed window size will make the windows either resizable or not.

Solution 4

You could always use mplayer :

mplayer -fs dvb://[card_number@]channel 

The -fs flag enables full screen mode.

Solution 5

There is also Gnome's own DVB Daemon. As its name suggests it sits behind the scenes allowing applications to leverage its power. There is a Totem plugin that allows you to use it (though I haven't tested a recent version so I don't quite know how good it is).

sudo apt-get install totem-plugins-dvb-daemon

That will get all the dependencies too.

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Comments

[Boris]

@Steve: I think that I tried TVtime long time ago, but it runs only with analogical signal and not with numeric signal no ?