gHacks technology news » watch tv online http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:02:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Sopcast Internet TV Filter For Windows Media Player http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/06/sopcast-internet-tv-filter-for-windows-media-player/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/06/sopcast-internet-tv-filter-for-windows-media-player/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:53:06 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=11715 Sopcast is a free Internet TV client that can be used by users worldwide to watch TV on their computer system. Most of the TV stations that get broadcast by Sopcast are in Chinese language. They are still very popular in many other countries as these channels tend to show live sports events that might not be shown in the country they are taking place. Sport is of course not the only program that gets streamed by Sopcast but it is one of the most important ones as it can be watched easily even when turning sounds down.

Sopcast users can use the software to view the TV shows directly. The interface of the software has been translated to English and provides the means to browse and search the available channels. Some users probably prefer to use another video player to view Internet TV. Sopcast is offering an application called Sopcast Filter which enables Windows Media Player users to tune in into Sopcast streams and watch the shows in that video player instead.

The disadvantage of this method is however that the channel list is not available in Windows Media Player. Sopcast TV channels can be opened from the Open URL menu in Windows Media Player which means the user needs the url of the show before it can be watched. Those information can be found in the original Sopcast player or from websites that post those links regularly.

Not very comfortable but the history function of Windows Media Player makes it easier to access the same channels again at a later time. Users who are interested in watching TV on their PC can also take a look at our PC TV article detailing some of the options.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/06/sopcast-internet-tv-filter-for-windows-media-player/feed/ 1 Watch TV online legally http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/15/watch-tv-online-legally/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/15/watch-tv-online-legally/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:23:03 +0000 Joe http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7627 The Internet is often a place where unlicensed television shows are easy to watch, albeit through websites offering streaming, torrents or USENET.

Recently, many websites have started to show shows free online but do so in a legal fashion, paying for the shows using advertisements.

Different websites seem to work in different jurisdiction but it is fair to say that a large amount is available to viewers from the United States only. Here are a few resources to watch tv shows online.

South Park Studios famously provided their shows online free of charge because the show’s creators were annoyed of people watching their shows illegally. Unfortunately, South Park Studios is not available in Great Britain; I suspect it is North America only.

Joost, the much hyped IPTV service which recently has recently made the transition from software to web-based, boasts a number of titles, both mainstream and online-only. In the UK, and possibly other countries, titles such as Babylon 5, Peep Show, Shameless and Robot Chicken.

YouTube has recently announced it will start ‘serving full-length TV dinners‘ including shows like Star Trek: The Original Series, MacGyver and Beverly Hills 90210. Unfortunately, this is unavailable in Europe.

Hulu is a site which offers free, ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and films from NBC and FOX, amongst others. This includes shows like The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Family Guy and even The Office! Predictably, this is also only for Americans.

BBC iPlayer is a free streaming video service kindly provided to people in the United Kingdom. iPlayer allows Brits to watch most shows broadcasted on a BBC channel in the past week on-demand. The BBC even admits that iPlayer technically does not require a licence fee, a type of tax which any British person with a TV set pays to help support the non-commercial BBC.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/15/watch-tv-online-legally/feed/ 9 TVU Player Internet TV revisited http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/14/tvu-player-internet-tv-revisited/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/14/tvu-player-internet-tv-revisited/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:20:01 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/14/tvu-player-internet-tv-revisited/ It has been a long time ago since I last reviewed the TVU Player, a popular software that streams TV to your computer, most call it Internet TV. I decided to download the latest version and see what has changed since my last review and I can promise you that some of the changes are really exciting.

The new TVU Player interface hosts more information than the previous one. A remarkable change is the language and topics bar at the top which filters channels by their language or topic. If you only want to view English channels for instance you click the English button and only those are displayed.

The same principle works for topics such as Sports or News. The right pane hosts messages, reviews and the tv guide which is probably the most useful of the three. You can select your timezone and get information about upcoming shows on the tv station that you are watching.

tvu player

On the downside advertisements have been added during load times and in the sidebar that holds the tv guide. The most important aspect of a Internet TV client is the availability of tv shows and stations. TVU Player is still primarily a client for Sports fans. You can still watch most major sports events including soccer, football and basketball live.

I was not able to find many other tv stations wort watching, most of them are Chinese and I do not speak Chinese. So, my conclusion would be that it is still an excellent tv client if you are a sports fan.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/14/tvu-player-internet-tv-revisited/feed/ 2 Big Online TV List http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/03/big-online-tv-list/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/03/big-online-tv-list/#comments Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:15:02 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/03/big-online-tv-list/ There are several ways to watch tv online. You can download episodes from video portals, use p2p networks to download shows, use p2p clients that stream tv in real time and use websites that do the same. The demand for and resources to do so are ever growing and it becomes quite a task to keep an overview over the best possibilities.

One Tip a Day posted a nice collection of sites and programs that make it possible to watch tv online. The list is unfortunately sorted by theme (tv shows, movies, cartoons and sports are the two categories). I personally think that it would have been better to categorize by way of viewing (website, software, download) and describe the type of content that can be viewed after the name of the service.

The list is great nevertheless, here is a short compilation of sites that I can recommend:

  • AlluC - links to various video portals, has a database of more than 17000 tv shows
  • TeeVee – similar in concept to AlluC
  • TVU Player – program that streams live tv, concentration on Asia. Lots of live sports events

The list at One Tip a Day is bigger of course, it contains about 30 links in total.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/03/big-online-tv-list/feed/ 4 Incredible Video Links Website http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/13/incredible-video-links-website/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/13/incredible-video-links-website/#comments Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:48:45 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/13/incredible-video-links-website/ The following website contains links to 17992 tv show episodes, 5151 cartoon series, 2582 movies, 12235 anime shows, 5741 music videos and 957 sports clips. It is called Alluc and could be described as a link aggregator for video websites. All it does is that it offers the users of the website a opportunity to post new links to videos that they found on various social video websites such as youtube or dailymotion.

Links are added immediately to the database and everyone will be able to search for and use the links to visit the website and view the video. Page navigation is fast and easy to comprehend. Click on a category like TV-shows and all TV-shows are displayed on the next page. It starts in this case with 15 storey high and 30 rock and ends with young Americans. I would estimate that they currently list about 400-500 tv-shows.

A click on a TV-show itself reveals all the – external – links to that TV-show. Alluc always displays a disclaimer before you can leave the website.

Alluc offers some comfortable options. You can display the latest videos that have been added to a category or display the most viewed ones in a category.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/13/incredible-video-links-website/feed/ 3 Watch hundreds of full tv shows, cartoons and anime http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/27/watch-hundreds-of-full-tv-shows-cartoons-and-anime/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/27/watch-hundreds-of-full-tv-shows-cartoons-and-anime/#comments Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:18:32 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/27/watch-hundreds-of-full-tv-shows-cartoons-and-anime/ TV Links is a site I never heard about before. It has a big listing of many of the most popular tv shows, cartoon & anime series. The site lists the name of the shows and the number of seasons that they link to on their main page. If you click on a link a page with all links to all episodes that are available will load and all that is left to do is click on one of the links to be taken to a website that hosts the movie.

Those websites are either youtube, dailymotion or bolt. To give you an impression, here are some of the tv shows that are listed on that site: 24 all five seasons, friends 6 seasons, one tree hill four seasons plus many additional shows such as desperate housewives, seinfeld, stargate and the office. It could really take weeks to watch all of the movies that are linked from that website.

The links to cartoon and anime shows are likewise huge. To name a few: Southpark, Futurama, Simpsons (all 18 seasons !), Spongebob in the cartoon category and Bleach, Dragonball Z (15 seasons) and GT, Full Metal Alchemist and Naruto in the anime category. Everything is just two clicks away.

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