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During a social gathering at work, one of our HR people switched to Spanish and told us how it was that she spoke the language. Though I understood her well enough, I found myself sputtering when I wanted to reply. It was then that I remembered that the last time I even spoke Spanish was more than 30 years ago. So I decided I have to brush up a bit. When the internet went mainstream here, I used to listen to radio from other countries, but I suppose we have moved on from there too. I decided to give TV a go. Whilst most of my friends just get all the streams added via Android, I decided to use my laptop. I supposed there would be free streaming somewhere, but it would be nice to have it in one place. Enter FreeTuxTV. To be honest, I have not sat down and watched TV in years, maybe more than 10, so it felt like a completely new feeling. (I have a friend, bless his heart, who would give me all the highlights – what to watch, etc. - and fill my external hard drive with said chart toppers.)
Installation:
You will have to add a PPA repo:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freetuxtv/freetuxtv
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freetuxtv/freetuxtv-dev
sudo apt install freetuxtv
And…. You are ready to launch the program with:
freetuxtv
You should then be greeted by a “station chooser”. Simply pick a station and accept. Don’t worry, you can add or remove them later on the settings, so it does not matter what you choose.
The interface will have “channels” and “recordings” down the side, allowing you to stream from the interwebs or from your own server.
I installed this on Vanilla Ubuntu to test, and did not try it on Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc, but in the flagship release, the play button launches VLC player. I don’t know how I feel about this, as I wanted an all in one, like QMPlay2.
As you can see from this image (top), I have a floating VLC player over the application. I suppose you want to watch full-screen when you watch TV. On their Github page, the image looks a little different, with the viewport embedded in the program. The issue with that is, once maximised, you struggle to make it small again. Even the mighty esc-key is no match for the will of VLC to own your screen.
As you can probably see, I launch it via the command-line. I’m not trying to be a neckbeard here, I simply use it to see if a channel will play or not. You see, if you load it via the launcher, sometimes, you don’t know if a channel is buffering, or not going to play at all. With the command-line, you can immediately see if the channel is found or not.
It is not to say that the launcher is not cute as heck.
Just like other TV viewers, you periodically need to update the TV database. (Well it updates radio too, but you know what I mean, right?)
I suggest making this your first action, before trying to watch TV or listen to radio. This may take a while, but it is worth the wait.
The awesome part is that you can record live TV, or, in our case, streamed TV. You simply hit the record button and off you go. This is where the floating VLC window sort of gets in the way. I suppose there are keys to record, but a newbie to the program will try to record from the red record button. On the positive side, you can choose the time-frame you would like to record, should you be making supper when your favourite show is on.
I apologise for having so many images, but one gets to grips much better once you see something.
I would like to see more channels in the future, maybe add those that require usernames and passwords, and let the user decide. It comes equipped with a proxy setup, allowing you to watch movies and series on retarded channels that geoblock you.
The github page mentions that it supports Tvheadend, but you can access that only via recordings. ( I suppose it does make sense, as Tvheadend is a DVR, but it does connect directly to cable etc.)
Oh well. FreeTuxTV gets an A for effort, a B for execution, and a C for ease of use – I’ll tell you why. I fiddled around and could not figure out how to add my own custom channels. You see they expect you to add a group. Maybe I’m too ‘old n crusty’, or maybe it could be a bit more user friendly when trying to import a web channel. Either way, it would also be greatly appreciated if someone could have a private list we could just import, like with Kodi. *wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Just to add that the Linux Mint team does an app called Hypnotix which is something similar.
You can install it from: https://github.com/linuxmint/hypnotix