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I pay less than $10 / month for my Cable TV and though that’s not much, the idea of being able to watch Cable TV for free is still very much interesting. I learned about the idea of free cable tv on the action online blog and I immediately decided to give it a try - though I have a Linux installation and have no Windows PCs within reach.

I’m talking about TVUPlayer and though it’s designed to run on Windows, I still took the step of downloading and installing it on my Linux system. I believe that setting it up on Windows would be pretty trivial but doing it on Linux required some extra efforts. In the end, I got it working. Here’s what I did. Note, I’m assuming that you already have wine installed and so I won’t go into the details of installing wine.

1. Install IE6 using IEs4Linux. This step is crucial as it setups the required runtime libraries for TVUPlayer. I know that there could be another way but then again, this is how I did it.
2. While IE6 is installing, I downloaded TVUPlayer here.
3. After IE6 was installed, I unzipped the TVUPlayer installer in a folder of my choice. The only content of TVUPlayer.zip is Setup.exe
4. Then, I ran wine Setup.exe and went through the installation process
5. After installation, I typed (including the quotes) cd “$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TVUPlayer”
6. Then I typed wine TVUPlayer.exe

Here’s what I got for my efforts:

TVUPlayer - runs on Linux via Wine

As you can see it’s working but there’s one problem. When the streaming video starts to play, my screen goes crazy. Everything turns black and only the portion that shows the video is visible. This is typical for wine and I still can’t find a solution to fix it. Here’s how it looks like while playing.

TVUPlayer - runs on Linux but doesn’t look so good

As you can see, it’s not much of a pretty experience but hell it works - that is if you have nothing else to do but watch. But there’s a rather acceptable workaround and that is to let wine emulate a virtual desktop. You can do this in winecfg by clicking ‘Graphics’ then setting the virtual desktop parameters. Won’t go into details with winecfg so you have to give it a try for yourself. Anyways, after configuring wine to emulate a virtual desktop, I still get the same problem as before but at least this time I can work since the screen corruption is limited to the virtual desktop only.

Not so elegant but it works.

My verdict… TVUPlayer is good for Windows users. Linux users, unless you’re really into watching, I guess we have just to wait until a new solution comes up - one that supports Linux.

If you’re looking for something that really works then you might just want to get a real service…

Why not get something better? Click here for Cheap Satellite TV for Computers - PC or Laptop

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