My search for an open source, Ubuntu alternative for EyeTV on OS X is nearly over. I stumbled across ‘Me TV‘ a few days ago–and I’ve left it as long before writing up a post about it so that I could have a good play with it.

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As a follow up to yesterday’s post, here is a quick run through of how to use Mplayer to view DVB channels.

Basically, you just need to generate a channels.conf file (see this article) and place it inside ~/.mplayer/. Then run mplayer dvb:// in a terminal window. You’ll get a video window appear, and the first channel within your channels.conf file will start playing. To switch up and down between channels, you can press h and k. There’s a bunch of other helpful keyboard commands though not all of them will work with DVB.

While using Mplayer this way isn’t very user friendly, it may be helpful for some.

Watching TV on my desktop. What do I want to be able to do?

• Watch all Freeview (DVB-T) channels.
• Be able to pause, rewind, and forward to live TV.
• Schedule programs to record.
• See the TV listings for the channels I have.
• Fullscreen or windowed viewing.

I was able to do all of the above using EyeTV on my Mac. However, I’m trying to make the complete switch to Ubuntu, and an open-source alternative is needed.

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