Watching free TV on a Linux system

Do you want to watch TV programs on a Linux system, and for free? This opportunity appeared with the release of Freetuxtv, a free online player that was originally developed for subscribers of French providers. But after a while, free channels and radio stations were added to it. Now there is an opportunity to watch TV programs absolutely free. So the player offers to watch TV programs in more than 50 languages of the world.

The disadvantage is that there are no channels in maximum quality, but it can still be used to watch online TV Linux. The program will be useful for those who do not have the opportunity to watch programs live. Next, let's see how to take advantage of the utility functionality offered by the developer.

Installing Freetuxtv

First of all the user needs to install VLC, because FreetuxTV uses VLC backend to play radio and TV channels. After that, it is easy to compile and install FreetuxTV for your system. The latest versions of the program work with GTK3. You can also leverage developer PPAs when running in Ubuntu or Mint. For this purpose, add a repository:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freetuxtv/freetuxtv-dev

Updating packages:

$ sudo apt update

Install the program:

$ sudo apt install freetuxtv

The benefit of a repository is that it always has the latest and most up-to-date version. If you want, you can build the program from source code. The first thing to do is to install the dependencies. In Ubuntu it is done like this:

$ sudo apt install git gcc make autoconf automake intltool libtool libtool-bin gettext libgtk-3-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libcurl3 libcurl4-openssl-dev vlc libvlc-dev libnotify-dev

In Red Hat / Fedora:

$ sudo yum install subversion gcc autoconf automake make gettext-tools gtk2-devel vlc vlc-devel sqlite3-devel libcurl-devel dbus-1-glib-devel libnotify-devel

Next we build the program:

$ wget https://github.com/freetuxtv/freetuxtv/releases/download/freetuxtv-0.6.8/freetuxtv-0.6.8.tar.gz

tar xvfvz freetuxtv-0.6.8.tar.gz

cd freetuxtv-0.6.8

./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

make

sudo make install

That's it - now you can watch free TV channels both in Ubuntu and on any other distribution.

Watching TV on Linux

Launch the media player utility:

$ freetuxtv

Once the program starts, it will prompt you to create a list of your favorite TV channels. Do the job. Just select the desired channel and click the "Add" button. There is one problem - not all of them work. But it is pleasing that the TV channels are grouped according to the language of broadcasting. There are also in Russian:

After adding them, they will be displayed in the left panel:

To start watching TV, just click on the name of any TV channel:

Switch TV at will or set a recording if a program is on and you are away but want to watch it in a recording when you return.

Record a program online

Programs are on at different times, you may not be there, but with the system and the media player utility turned on, you can record in seconds. It is also possible to set a specific schedule, which makes things much easier.

Click the record button at the bottom of the window. In the dialog box that opens, you can set the duration of the recording:

View the recording status in the special tab "Video recordings". A corresponding user notification will appear in the bar.

The user has the opportunity to select one of several encoding formats in a window that can be opened by clicking FreetuxTV, then "Options" and "Video Recordings":

The program is not exactly popular, so many TV channels just stopped working. But you can always run it and see if the TV that appeals to you the most is there. There is nothing complicated about it - just follow the instructions.