HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

You have a DVB card (Digital Video Broadcasting, for digital TV that is)? You want to use your computer as a telly for watching and recording? Yet MythTV is a bit of a too much bloat, too hard to set up, sumtin like that?

Me-TV offers a light and easy solution providing automatical scanning of the available channels, watching telly, EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and on top of everything, allows you to scedule programs to record on hard disk.

I used to watch TV via xine. I had to manually scan channels from the command line before that worked, xine supports DVB but no electronic program guide and other nice features. One of the main reasons to get jiggy with Me-TV was of course the possibility to schedule programs to record (which I have already used couple times and I only installed it like three days ago).

There was yet another feature that I liked very much too. I live in Finland and thus I’m used to having subtitles on non-finnish talking programs, which was not a problem with most channels that still send the subtitles “burned” in the video itself. Also english speaking programs are not usually hard to follow for me either but there are programs in other languages out there - and some of them are shown on national channels that use DVB’s feature, digital subtitles that are sent separately (and possibly in more than one languages, Finland for example is bilingual country). So now I get to see subtitles on foreign programs too, another feature xine did not support natively (note that I’m not badmouthing xine here, it is not a TV application, it’s a video player - and Me-TV actually uses xine’s engine for rendering).

When saving programs the files, btw, are quite large but also in very good quality - and they are saved in such format that allows saving digital subtitles in the video file, even with multiple languages subtitles are saved if available.

How to install? Ok, the quick way, in debian, would be: su -c "apt-get install me-tv" …and for ubuntu: sudo apt-get install me-tv …or just select it from Synaptic. Or any other package management tool/application that your distribution supports. And remember, the latest version can always be obtained from Me-TV website.

Tags: debian, guide, Linux/Unix Software, Open Source, television

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 8:32 am and is filed under Linux/Unix Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.