how to turn my computer into a TV

[Aryeh Friedman]

Just a small notes on requirements we *DO NOT* have cable or any other
non-broadcast service (we are using a broadcast signal only [current
US {NYC} standards])

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Juergen Lock <nox at jelal.kn-bremen.de> wrote:
> In article <CAKYr3zwQqYihzcOMYUobOBou-svqYLMgK36qDneBVcvGBHJ0Gg at mail.gmail.com> you write:
>>On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Niclas Zeising <zeising at daemonic.se> wrote:
>>> On 06/17/12 04:14, Aryeh Friedman wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I just moved into a very cramped apartment and we only have room for
>>>> one monitor so it is the computer then I heard it is possible to make
>>>> it so you can watch TV on your computer.... I know about some this for
>>>> windows but I am dedicated FreeBSD person... how do I go about doing
>>>> all the research I need to make sure that the following is true:
>>>>
>>>> 1. FreeBSD supports all hardware (and the needed functionality) to
>>>> watch full screen tv on my computer (extra points of a remote can be
>>>> used)... NOTE: This hardware must be currently fairly mass market
>>>> 2. What ports to install (right now my desktop is x11-wm/xfce4) make this
>>>> happen
>>>> 3. Any tips on making it optimal
>>>
>>>
>>> This is perhaps not the solution you are looking for, but many modern TV
>>> screens has a VGA and a DVI input connector, as well as many fairly modern
>>> computers has HDMI output. DVI is also compatible with HDMI, at least to an
>>> extent. Perhaps you can find a monitor and use it as a dual-purpose monitor
>>> instead?
>>> Regards!
>>> --
>>> Niclas Zeising
>>
>>I think hes maybe looking for a tv tuner card to plug into his
>>computer so he can watch TV on the PC also...
>>Haupauge makes a few and are compatible with FreeBSD. See  Setting Up TV Cards
>>and a good list is freebsd-multimedia
>>http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/tvcard.html
>
> That handbook chapter only mentions analog bktr(4) tuner cards so
> it's a bit outdated.  Nowadays you can also use cx88-based analog
> and dvb-t/atsc(?) pci(e) tuner cards driven by the multimedia/cx88
> port, as well as a greater variety of usb tuners supported by
> multimedia/webcamd which runs the Linux v4l/dvb driver code in
> FreeBSD userland.  See
>
>        http://wiki.freebsd.org/WebcamCompat
>
> for some tuners people have reported as working.  Another usb
> atsc tuner that has good chances of working is this one:
>
>        http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-950Q
>
> (at least it seems pretty popular on Linux.)
>
>  And about tv apps that you can control using a remote (usually via
> comms/lirc), the most popular ones are multimedia/mythtv and
> multimedia/vdr, see these pages:
>
>        http://wiki.freebsd.org/HTPC
>
>        http://wiki.freebsd.org/MythTV
>
> and
>
>        http://wiki.freebsd.org/VDR
>
> as well as multimedia/xbmc-pvr that you can use with vdr as backend
> as also described in the above vdr wiki page.
>
>  HTH, :)
>        Juergen