PC TV Programs – Watch TV Programs on PC
This article describes the possibilities of PC TV, which simply means to watch TV on the PC using PC TV programs. Have you encountered a situation like the following before? Great the next match of my favorite sports team will not be shown on free TV. Actually it will not be shown at all in your country, except if you are lucky enough to have a satellite connection available of course. If you encounter situations like this one and always thought there would be no other solution than to watch boring live tickers on internet sites, then you may be interested in finding out more about programs that bring television live streams to your computer.
I will describe three freeware programs that let you connect to channels that stream TV and especially live sports events. This includes all major European football (soccer) leagues, champions league, uefa cup, espn, wrestling, national team matches, boxing matches aso.
You also find regular TV stations like MTV and custom stations like gamers TV there. On with the PC TV programs.
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PC TV
All you need to watch TV on your PC is an operating system with the latest windows media player and / or real player. A broadband connection is recommended for best results. All three PC TV programs to watch TV on the PC have been produced in Asia making it hard to read the websites. Those websites offer TV program lists among other information.
First, let us take a look at some options in media player and real player:
Start the media player, make sure you use the latest version. Right-Click and select Options from the menu. Click on Performance and Change the Buffer Size of Content to 30 seconds.
In real player you select Tools -> Preferences and click on the General -> Playback Settings. The setting Buffer up to 30 seconds is at the bottom of this window.
Stream formats:
mms:// and .asx open with windows media player
rtsp:// and .rm / .ram open with real player
Starting Streams manually:
Sometimes you need to start streams manually. Use the stream formats information to figure out the program to use.
On windows media player choose File -> Open Url or the shortcut ctrl + u
On real player choose File -> Open
PC TV Programs
This is a list of free PC TV programs that can be used to view TV on PC.
Download from the above link, unzip, start. This will run the installer on your system, note that it contains an adware offer that you need to uncheck by selecting custom installation from the available options. The program displays a number of tabs at the top. First thing you may want to do is click on Option > Language to switch the interface language to English as other languages are not that optimized right now.
A click on Live Channels displays the available channel list. A click on a channel here opens it in an adjacent window to the current one. While you can browse the channels individually to find TV stations that you are interested in, it makes more sense to use a scheduling service that acts as a TV guide, and especially so if you are looking for a specific match or show you are interested in. Check out our list of options at the end of the article.
Note that you may sometimes see ads when the channel is loading. These sometimes tell you that a plugin is missing but that is just the ad telling you that and not really the case. So, do not click on those options as they are not telling the truth.
Just download and run the installation script on pplive. Its all in English, no need to worry. You need the pplive channel list for it, it does not come with a loaded list.
Please also note that the website is in Chinese, and that you may need a translation tool to find the download option on the site. I suggest you use Google Chrome for that if the browser is installed on your system, or Google Translate if it is not. To download the program, visit this page directly which lists the available download options for various operating systems and devices including Windows.
I highly suggest you click on the English download link here as you'd otherwise end up with a Chinese interface. Please note that the program is fully in Chinese even if you download the English version. You can however browse the available contents and the thumbnails may help you find the contents you are looking for.
Download from the above location. This one has an installation script that is unfortunately producing lots of gibberish. The buttons are designed like in every other windows installation script. (left button, choose a directory, 3x middle button). The Channel list is on the left, you see the channel name, the quality of the stream in Kb per second and the users connected to the channel.
If I had to choose one of them I'd definitely choose Sopcast right now as it is the only program that is offering an English user interface.
Popular PC TV Channels:
| channel | content | language |
| CCTV5 | european soccer, other sport events. | Asian ? |
| ESPN | All major us leagues, european soccer + more | English |
| Games Tv (ppstream) | professional game play, tournaments, mags | Asian ? |
| Soccer Demo | soccer | Asian ? |
| Sport Italia | Italian Sports Channel | Italians |
Live Sports Streaming
Check out our list of sports streaming portals on the Internet that you can use to watch the latest sports matches in your browser or in a one of the programs listed above. The sites list the latest matches and live streaming opportunities so that you can watch them on your PC directly.
Using PC TV programs on your computer has never been easier than in today's Internet. Users can pick a wide variety of applications that bring TV streams to their computer for free.
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?