We wanted to watch the the soccer worldcup finale yesterday at home. Having no TV set around (cannot afford to loose more brain) some old computer hardware including a lend tv-card was reactivated and had a Opensuse 10.1 smoothly installed (well, installation started in time). After we had managed to get the terrestrial tv signal using some metres of garden wire (including the obligatory “Alright, please keep your position now”) and thanks to the made up antenna then had choosen between some color and sharpness we felt like watching TV in the 60ies: rather black/white and blurred picture (HDTV to PAL to 1024x768x16bit). The rather jerky movement of the french players only added up to that. KWinTV played perfectly and didn’t cause any headaches (neither chestaches… :P).
I was satisfied showing my friends how easy such a quick and complete setup worked with this free software distribution. 🙂 But I omitted that I was not really satisfied. I miss some support for these kind of setups. Like a package set in Yast. Or some KMC (K media center) session or alike available in the login manager.
But I see it’s coming:
- There is the SoC project for Advanced Session Management with KDE by Will Entriken which hopefully brings the ability to setup some profiles for e.g. a media center like session.
- Rasterman shows with Rage (against the machine) why waiting for Enlightenment 0.17 is better than waiting for Godot. (Watch the “video shot”!)
- And Christian Schaller just today blogs about the first release of Fluendo’s Elisa Media Center. Well, it seems to lack support for television but that should be solvable. Okay, then I understand why one would ignore television…
Like someone on kde-look.org proposed already two years ago: The (KDE) programs are there. It just needs someone to put them in a shell.
So hopefully things will be ready for 2010… 🙂
Attracted by virtual constructs 
Just too bad analog TV is a dead standard by then. 🙂
Well, DVB + kaffeine combo works for me.
Indeed, DVB-T + kaffeine works like a charm (in kubuntu). I borrowed a DVB-T tuner (USB) from a friend to test, and it worked instantly. I just plugged the tuner in, started kaffeine, scanned for channels and voilá, it worked!
That’s plug’n play the way I like it 🙂 Even better than in windows I presume.
E17 (and the associated libraries the blog is demonstrating well) has got many plain superior qualities if you compare it with Gnome.. You wan’t to see something even more rad? Same adapted to Ipaq at http://www.rasterman.com/files/eem.avi
The only downsides E17 has got against the Gnome are a) it isn’t ready yet b) it doesn’t integrate (yet?) as well with the hardware (HAL magic with devices and such) c) the file manager is from 80s CCCP.
Reading about their libraries and applications, how efficient and elegant they are in a way, makes this Gnome user envy. Daily. Watch out, Gnome.