xawtv homepage
About xawtv
xawtv started as TV application for the bttv driver, because the Motif-based "xtvscreen" was the only TV application at this time. Alot has changed since:
- The xawtv and bttv driver switched over to the video4linux interface.
- Support for more interfaces was added: Xvideo Extention, the new video4linux2 interface and BSD Family video grabber driver (bktr).
- xawtv isn't a single application any more, it is a small suite of video4linux related software, with video recording capabilities and serveral useful command line tools.
- In the future even more hardware will be supported, the current development snapshots already have DVB support for example.
xawtv 3.x releases
The 3.x releases are the stable versions. These versions are in "bugfixes only" mode right now. You can download the source code here.
xawtv 4.x snapshots
Current development happens in the tree for the upcomming 4.0 version. It is still experimental, thus there is no release yet. You can download cvs snapshots through if you want to check them out.
What exactly is in the xawtv package...
The X11 applications:
- xawtv
- of course, it is still the main application, for watching TV.
- motv
- a new, IMHO better, TV application with a Motif-based GUI.
- mtt
- a teletext browser, also uses Motif. This one works on a terminal too.
- pia
- a simple movie player.
There are also a number of tools for the command line and the linux console:
- fbtv
- is a TV application for the linux console, it uses a framebuffer devices to display the video.
- streamer
- a command line tool for recording movies.
- v4lctl
- a command line tool to set video4linux parameters (tune in some channel, set TV norm, ...).
- scantv
- a command line tool to do a channel scan.
- radio
- a simple, curses-based radio app.
- webcam
- captures images and uploads them to a Web-Server via ftp or ssh in a endless loop.
- alevtd
- a http server for videotext pages, so you can watch read videotext with a webbrowser.
Most of the apps share the xawtv config file (~/.xawtv).
Ressources
- xawtv comes with a bunch of unix manual pages as documentation. Every application has one, and there also is the xawtvrc page which describes the config file.
- There also is a small FAQ page.
- Have a look at the TV fonts page for some useful fonts.
- For discussions the video4linux list is used.