PPA for cchester

Website: http://home.arcor.de/saedelaere/index_eng.html

The idea for TV-Viewer came to my mind after purchasing a Hauppauge PVR 150. Soon I had to realize that there exists a pretty good driver but not a simple to use viewer.
Turning my desktop in a pvr with mythtv or freevo wasn't a real alternative for me. Both programs are in an advanced state of development and are doing a good job, but for my purposes they seemed to be a little overkill.
If you want to learn more about them just follow the links.

TV-Viewer is written in Tcl/Tk. It is an easy to use programming language which allows you to develop sophisticated programs and graphical user interfaces.
One big advantage is that, software based on Tcl/Tk nearly runs on every platform, without big adaptions to the code. However TV-Viewer will only be developed for Linux.

So whats this all about?
In generally you should know, that this is not a complete viewer for wathing tv on Linux. With the gui, I am developing, you can get rid of using a terminal with pvr devices and it provides some more advantages.
Still you'll have to use one of the provided video players like MPlayer, Kaffeine, Vlc or Xine.

Features:

    * Easy to use gui to control your device.
    * Easy installation. (Packages for various major distributions).
    * Configuration wizard for all relevant settings.
    * Simple configuration file for your channels. This can be applied by using an automatic channel search with the build in "channel editor". There you can activate or deactivate channels, rename them or change their order.
    * Volume control.
    * "On screen display", that shows the actual channel and the volume on your screen.
    * Videocard control (Hue, Saturation, Brightness and Contrast)
    * Support for your remote control using Lirc.
    * Build in user guide.
    * Time-controlled recordings.
    * And many more ;)

What you can expect in the future:

    * Teletext support using mtt4 (included in the latest xawtv).
    * Timeshifting
    * Radio support
    * More supported video players.
    * Graphical user interface for the record wizard.
    * A more appealing appearance of the gui with possibilities for the user to change it.
    * Packages for debian based distributions.
    * Documentation of the source code.
    * Supporting all inputs of the tv-cards.
    * And many more ;)

Roadmap:

Version 0.7.6.3beta1

    * Using frequencies instead of channels. Should allow you to finetune your stations.

Version 0.8

    * Complete new design of the gui.
    * Swithing to TCL/TK version 8.5.
    * "Configuration Wizard" will only provide basic settings. The rest can be done in a seperate dialogue.
    * Teletext support based on mtt4.
    * Timeshifting
    * ??

Version 0.9

    * Graphical user interface for the record wizard.
    * Optical improvements.
    * ??

If you have any suggestions about the development of TV-Viewer please feel free to contact me.You can have a closer look on the program in the screenshots section. Further information can be found in the user guide.

Supported devices:

Basically all devices that are supported by the ivtv driver, should work TV-Viewer. An overview can be found here.
But there are more devices that are supported. For example the Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2 or HVR 1500/1600 are both known to work together with ivtv-tune and v4l2-ctl. According to that they are provided by TV-Viewer.

Here is my own list of devices that were reported as working:
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 500
Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2

If you're using a different device together with TV-Viewer please give me a short note about it.
Thanks!

© Copyright 2007-2008 Christian Rapp under GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2