how to turn my computer into a TV

[Juergen Lock]

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it's a bit outdated.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