I now have TWO Hauppauge WinTV PCI cards @ my workstation. The left screen shows a DVD being played by an external DVD player (read by /dev/video1 using composite-video as its input source) and the right screen shows a regular TV program (/dev/video0). I can also watch 2 TV channels at the same time (nice to avoid commercials).
Here is one of my earlier (bad) solutions of watching Youtube videos on FreeBSD. With clive it is possible to watch Youtube w/o having any browser flash plugin installed.
A colleague of mine at work mentioned, that it should be now possible to use the linux flashplugin in some version of FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE due linprocfs fixes. I'll test it after 7.1-RELEASE is out.
Der Trick ist zwar alt, aber ich wollte es hier im Blog auch noch gepostet haben :) Wenn man sich das TV-Programm (aus Retrozwang, oder weil man einfach kein X11 mag, oder wenn man einfach kein X11 hat) ansehen will, dann halten die Textbrowser Links oder Lynx oder sogar W3M her! Folgendes Beispiel hab ich mal mit dem Lynx (der übrigens auch ein prima Gopher-Client ist) durchgeführt.
Man muß einfach lynx http://text.epgdata.de/tv-programm/index.php (Früher war das Programm erreichbar unter http://text.hoerzu.de/tv-programm) in die Konsole oder in den Terminalemulator (bei mir mrxvt) eingeben und man bekommt das TV-Programm im Textmodus präsentiert :) Hörzu, der Betreiber des Portals, bietet diesen Service schon mehrere Jahre an. Seit Neustem wird der Dienst unter der Domäne EPGData.de angeboten. Die text Subdomain ist wohl eigentlich extra für behinderte Internetbenutzer eingerichtet worden.
It has always been a pain to get a recent version of Adobe Flash running on a FreeBSD desktop system. I am a fanatic FreeBSD user, and I use FreeBSD not only for servers but also on my Desktop as well as on my Laptop!
First, Adobe does not offer a native version of Flash for the FreeBSD operating system. However, FreeBSD has the capability to run Linux binaries natively. Therefore there are Linux Flash binaries in the FreeBSD Ports Tree available, which are www/linux-flashplugin7 and www/linux-flashplugin9. I was able to get Linux Flash 7 working on FreeBSD, however the Flash 9 version never worked well for me. Doesn't matter which browser I use. I don't want to list all errors and trails here I faced already. Lot's of websites however already require Flash 9. I found a suboptimal, but at least working, solution for having Flash 9 on FreeBSD. It's called using Windows Firefox on Wine. It works flawlessly :)
First install Wine 1.0 or higher (may ll work with an older version too). Afterwards download Firefox 3 for Windows XP. Run the installer with wine. The installation will work out without any complications.
After installation you can start Firefox with wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe.
Now browse to the Adobe website and download the Flash Player for Windows. Afterwards close Firefox and run the Flash installer via Wine using wine install_flash_player.exe.
Now start Firefox again. As you can see, the Flash Player works flawlessly :-)
I hope some day I'll be able to run a more native version of Flash on my FreeBSD. A working Linux Flash 9 would be fine. Even better would be a 100% native version like Gnash, which is an open source implementation of Flash. However, Gnash is still to unstable and lacks features. Maybe next year?
Well, as you may know, people tend to watch the european soccer championship. Recently I compared an internet TV stream to its analog cable TV counterpart. The watch in the upper right corner of each transmission represents a countdown until the match starts. As you can see, the analog cable TV (to the left) is 16 seconds ahead of the "live" internet stream (to the right). I like my old fashioned Hauppauge WinTV (with BrookTree chip) card. Oh, and here is the screenshot:
