Problems with turning a Linux box into a TV

[piga]

Hello all,

We have turned an old computer and a large monitor into a TV box to replace our old dying TV. The system is running Fedora 14, but due to only having a 3 gb hard drive in it is very limited software wise. For the GUI we are using Blackbox, Gmixer for audio mixing (without pulseaudio), Tux Commander as a file manager, Conky for system information, SMplayer for generic videos, and tvtime for television playback from our capture card. The video card being used is a ATI Radeon 9200.

Everything is working great except for tvtime, which will hang up after a variable amount of uptime. Is there anyway to get around this problem, or will I have to switch tools?

If I do need to switch tools, the replacement would need to have closed captioning support and should not require any large dependencies, such as those associated with Gnome or KDE programs. I would also prefer one available through the Fedora repos, though that is not absolutely necessary.

If it were not for the crashing, tvtime would be ideal but it is really getting on our nerves now, especially when it pimps itself with the stupid captions it puts on its top bar (such as "tvtime: like a rock" or "you can depend on tvtime"). Well, so far we can depend on it to sink like a rock everytime...

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out.

[briand]

videolan client (VLC)

supports all the popular (and some not-so-popular) video/audio formats, built-in captioning support, etc.

[assen]

Hi,

I'm running XBMC (the absolutely best open media centre) off a 2 GB flash and I still have enough free space. XBMC is available in Fedora repos, but I'd recommend an Ubuntu LTS, it is much more compact. See here for details: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=88583 (just skip the NVidia part and add an ATI driver instead; should be straightforward).

As of the capture card, XBMC cannot work directly with it, but you can install tvheadend ( http://www.lonelycoder.com/tvheadend ) - and XBMC has a plug-in to work wit it, so you get your TV channels as a media source in XBMC.

WWell,

[piga]

Well, after searching around for a replacement for tvtime I have settled on the XDTV program available through the RPM Fusion repositories. It works well for the most part, with my largest complaint being that any setting I do from the program itself is not saved. This can be alleviated by defining certain things the programs config file directly though.

However, I can not seem to get closed captioning working as I did with tvtime. Does anyone know if this is simply a deficiency with the program, or is there some way I have not figured out to get this working?

Also, I have switched to Gnome MPlayer instead of SMPlayer as it seems to have a less sizeable imprint on disk space.