Thread: Watching TV on your PC

The idiot box is on its way out and the information box is taking its place. TV tuner cards have been in the market for more than a decade, and have been the first in a line of products that aim to convert the home PC into the home entertainment system. Lately, manufacturers have released media extenders to play and record TV via an external box, connected to the central computer over a home network. Of course; downloading TV shows, movies and various video files has always been in vogue, and we don't anticipate it going out of style any time soon. But. there is a new player in the field of watching TV on your computer, and that is video streaming.

The main advantage that streaming video has over downloading video, is the time
factor. When a user downloads a video file, he inevitably has to wait until a certain portion of the file has been downloaded before he can preview and check the quality of the file. With streaming online videos on the other hand, he knows instantly how good it is, and if it is in the language he understands. Additionally, downloading a typical movie will occupy at least 700 MB on his hard disk, whereas the memory occupied by streaming videos is cleared once he leaves that Web page.



According to Dan Morrell of Slate the early stages YouTube and Google Video were chock-full of movies and episodes, which were later removed after some legal action was initiated by Hollywood studios against them. How is the Indian viewer affected by this? Not too much, since YouTube still has users who upload episodes of popular Hindi TV shows, for instance, 'Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi', a few hours after it airs on Star Plus.

It is interesting to note that the industry has tackled TV show piracy using this method differently than they did for downloading. American audiences have Hulu, a website that was started by NBC and News Corp. It has a catalog of every TV show and movie produced under their banner which they can watch. The obvious upside to this is that it's perfectly legal and the viewer doesn't have to worry about breaking any laws, and the quality is superb. Note, only those users with an IP address originating in the United States can watch videos on Hulu. So, does any Indian channel offer this kind of service? Well, sort of. If you browse to the home page of a channel, there are uploaded video clips of recent episodes of popular shows, mainly reality TV, but not whole episodes. Network18's latest venture In.com does offer Live TV for the news channels CNBC, CNN-IBN and IBN, and full episodes of 'Bigg Boss2' , but these are far and few between (CHIP is a member of the Network18 family).

The other options available to viewers of 'desi' TV lie on the other side of the fence. The most popular of these is powered by ApniCommunity , the reason for its popularity being that they are prompt, decent quality, and most importantly a free service. Some other services that provide Indian TV content are iDesiTV. which both come at an affordable price. These two services lie in a murky grey area, with users not quite sure about the legality. Of course, those who don't care about the law can frequent websites that provide unauthorized online streaming content, for instance, 66Stage which has an awesome compilation of links for movies, TV shows, documentaries and cartoons. Most of the content on this website is linked from respectable online video services such as Veoh. and Google Video.

So, now you know where to go and watch TV streamed from the Web on your PC. Now, how about recording it? With the programs provided on this month's CH I P DVD, you can convert your PC wholly into a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) with timer controls for starting and stopping recordings. The best part about all this is that you don't need to shell out for a TV tuner card. Also included are some rad tools for editing and archiving your video files in a library.