furious_tv
furious_tv is a set of tools to take XMLTV TV listings and enable a UNIX system to automatically record programs off of a TV card. It is written in C and uses a SAX parser for maximum speed and efficiency.
Releases: ftv_gnome Version 1.0 Released
Last Modified: 2003-09-03T02:39Z
ftv_gnome Version 1.0
I am very pleased to announce the availability of ftv_gnome version 1.0. ftv_gnome is a powerful, high-performance front end for furious_tv for the GNOME platform. For those unfamiliar with the project, furious_tv is a personal video recorder (PVR) backend that parses XMLTV 0.5 listings and then (using a cron job) automatically executes commands to begin recording off of a capture device. There are similar projects (such as WVCR), but furious_tv has a very fast listings parser (written in C) and supports multiple capture devices.
ftv_gnome is a complete and easy-to-use front end to the furious_tv backend that integrates with the GNOME desktop. Unlike the last preview release (version 0.1), version 1.0 of ftv_gnome has a complete feature set and allows one to create a database, parse listings, set settings, and mark programs for recording all through a GTK interface (no SQL knowledge required). Just install furious_tv and then install ftv_gnome and everything should work. ftv_gnome allows easy sorting, filtering, and searching of program data and can attempt send the user to a search page on IMDb for more information on a program.
In case you are at all curious, the reason I developed furious_tv and now ftv_gnome is that I was fed up with the current generation of similar applications. Most of them were web based and/or required a separate RDBMS process (usually MySQL) to be running. I didn't like the hassle of setting all of those extra programs. When I finally got everything setup, all of the applications had their own strange, underpowered, and often hideous GUIs. GNOME and GTK are great technologies and, combined with SQLite, ftv_gnome is a powerful application for managing your cable TV.
