If you are like me, I seldom watch television because I am:

1. always sitting at computer
2. never anything on that I like
3. don't have the good channels
4. channels I do get have crappy topics (I have over 100 worthless dishnet channels...except for the history and discovery channels)

(excuse me while I make a self note right here....remind me to find out why the latest version of firefox steals my cursor and activates search every damn time I click on the fckeditor toolbar......driving me crazy at 5:30 am after an all nighter on the puter)

I wanted to show you software that allows you to watch television using Linux, over the internet, with access to 3,408 channels. You can also search for channels, and a simple search for hack brought up many I have already subscribed to (actually over 100 channels, but the top 10 or so was more what I was looking for).

The Software

Miro (previously known as democracy)

Most Linux distributions probably have it in their package manager, so look there first. Unless it is a really old version there is no reason to not use the one provided by your distribution.

Screenshot - click image for larger image

After you have the software installed, the next thing you will want to do is to add some channels. You can find them here: MiroGuide.com

To add a channel, click on the green Add Channel button next to the station you want to add. On my computer, the file was not associated with any program, so it tried to download it:

What I did was to selected Open with and then clicked on browse. The browse window appears. Instead of browsing for the file however, I simply typed the path to it...which is /usr/bin/miro on my computer. Here is another screen shot:

Then, the miro application is added next to the Open with selection as in this next image:

Next, I pressed the OK button and then it imported the list of previous shows into the miro subscription viewer. The next image shows the new channel listing:

To watch one of the shows, simply double click on it. Here is an example of the above Tekzilla show:

One Warning: If you want to keep the shows you watch or download, you need to make some changes to miro. By default, miro is set to delete downloaded content every 6 days. To change this setting, click on File - Options and select the Disk Space tab. Modify the settings there. There are many other options...so check them out. Here is a picture of the Disk Space tab: