Watch TV on Your Computer
Choose from a variety of Linux programs to watch TV from your desktop.
Your TV tuner is installed, all the cables are connected, and the card is recognized by Linux, but how do you actually watch TV with it? This hack covers some of the Linux tools you can use to configure your TV tuner and watch TV with it from your Linux desktop.
The most basic program you can use to watch TV under Linux is xawtv, which started as an application specifically for the bttv driver, but since then has been expanded to work with video4linux, so you can use it with a number of tuners. xawtv is a good place to start when you want to test your tuner because it has been around for quite a while, so it is not only well tested, it also is likely to be packaged by your distribution. To install it, find the xawtv package in your distribution’s package manager. If for some reason your distribution doesn’t package it, download the latest version of xawtv from the official download page at http://dl.bytesex.org/releases/xawtv and follow the installation documentation to compile and install it.
With xawtv installed, you could just immediately launch it; however, no channel frequencies for your particular tuner have been configured yet, so you won’t be able to tune into a channel. It’s possible to configure everything by hand, but xawtv includes a utility called scantv that scans the tuner for available channels (much like the scan function on many car stereos) and generates a configuration ...