Warning: Record TV is not (currently) for the faint-hearted. One day, I hope it will have several friendly user interfaces, and lots of pretty colours. For now, if you don't like the idea of typing a long command at a terminal just to record a TV show, you should probably look elsewhere.

Record TV records TV on your Linux desktop. It also has experimental support for playing back recordings on the Nintendo Wii (using the Opera web browser).

It tries to take a direct approach, using the large and flexible toolkit that is available to Linux users, and should be useful for people who like to have control over how things work. It attempts to take the Unix approach of being a small tool that does one job well.

It's designed to be very flexible about how you set up recordings: the recording system looks in certain directories for the right kinds of files, and when it sees them it knows what to record. How those files get there is up the user interface, which means lots of different user interfaces can (potentially) all interact with the same recording system.

At the moment, it has essentually no UI for setting up recordings, and a simple web UI for playing them back.

Why not use MythTV instead? Well, you probably should, but I don't because:

• I want my tv recording to work in the background, using cron and at, as life is supposed to be.
• I want my tv recording to happen on my desktop computer, not a dedicated PVR box.
• I can never get MythTV working.