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.

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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This article describes the possibilities of PC TV, which simply means to watch tv on the pc. 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 my country, except for satellite 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 have come to the right place that brings you the solution called PC TV.

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.

PC TV

All you need to watch pc tv is a computer with the latest windows media player and / or real player. A broadband connection is desired for best results. All three programs to watch pc tv 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

Sopcast

Download from the above link, unzip, start. A channel list will be displayed. Double-click a channel and windows media player should start and begin buffering and displaying.

Pplive

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.

Ppstream

Download from the above location. This one has an installation script that is unfortunatly 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 defiantly choose ppStream which has the best interface and good user rates and a nice overall stream quality.

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

Additional Information:

Live Football Streams Schedule

More P2P TV Tools:
Coolstreaming
QLive
TvAnts

Watching PC TV on your computer has never been easier than these days. Users can pick a wide variety of applications that bring pc tv to their computer without having to pay a dime.

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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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Web video is so popular that Internet Providers throughout the world are feeling the network bandwidth increase and trying to find ways to lower the bandwidth consumption. The popularity of web video caused a strong increase in web video downloaders and converters that download videos from video portals to the local computer.

TubeMaster (via Download online video using TubeMaster Plus) is one of those applications. The portable application supports more than 100 video portals including the ever popular Youtube and Dailymotion but also some unsuspected ones like Hulu, IGN or ESPN. Not all web video portals could be tested because some will only show the videos to users of specific countries. A test of downloading web video from Hulu would be greatly appreciated.

The application uses its own browser that can be used to display the video portal websites. Videos will be automatically downloaded when they are played on the portal. This is unfortunately the only way to download videos from the various websites.

It is still a comfortable way to download web video. Besides the option to load the websites directly users can also use the search engine included to search for various on single or all web video websites.

A maximum of 500 search results can be displayed. The videos cannot be downloaded directly from the search. A click displays additional information about the selected web video and an option to load the video on the video portal's website from where it will be automatically downloaded when it starts playing.

Another option is the mp3 search which leaves the user in the dark from where the files are coming. Quicktime is needed to play and download the mp3.

Videos can be automatically decoded which is the default option in TubeMaster. The user can choose between various video codecs and stop the conversion.

Tubemaster supports adult web video sites as well but that option is locked for users who subscribe to the service. Downloading from the "normal" web video portals is completely free though.

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ABC started their streaming service on their website today. Users from the USA are able to watch episodes of Lost, Desperate Houswives, Alias and others right from the website. Unfortunatly they check your IPs origin and decline access if the whois turns out to be from outside the USA. But as always, there is a way around this restriction.

This is slighty complex but you should get used to the procedure. All you need is a http proxy that is hosted inside the USA and does not spill your IP address. To achieve this you need a application that checks proxy servers for those variables. I recommend Charon for this task but you could use other tools as well.

Download Charon from the website mentioned, you don´t need to install it at all, just extract the contents to a directory of your choice.

Fire it up, you have no proxy list yet so you could use google to find some lists or let charon do that for you. Simply select Check Proxies and then Scan Search Engines for new Proxies. Charon will find some proxies that are then displayed in the table. Those are unverified, now select Check Proxies and Check Anonymity of all Proxies. This might take some time. If you only recieve bad and timeouts you have to change one option in charon.

Select Connect Options and chose Use External Judge(s).

Let it test the proxies. If you have enough good ones or a finished test sort the proxies by the Country tab. Only USA proxies are working so we need one of those. The Anonymity tab should state YES. If both are correct right click the line and select Copy to clipboard and Copy selected IP:Port.

Open your browser and paste the proxy address into its proxy settings. For firefox you select Tools >> Options >> Connection Settings >> Manual Proxy Configuration and add the proxy and port there. Close the options and visit the abc streaming site. If you see a Launch button you are ready to enjoy the tv shows. If not try another proxy from the list.

I checked the service with this proxy and it worked flawlessly: 192.104.67.250 port:8080

Enjoy the shows.

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