Features

Freevo allows you to manage your entire digital media collection - music, videos, photos etc. via a remote controlled TV interface and through the built in web interface you can also access your media, view your TV guide and schedule recordings from anywhere in the world. The benefit of freevo above other HTPC solutions is that freevo is 100% DRM free, plays video in 99.99% of formats, and most of all puts you in control of the television.

As an open-source home theatre PC platform, Freevo employs a number of open-source audio/video tools, MPlayer and/or Xine are used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone HTPC computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer or laptop using the monitor and keyboard.

Freevo1

Freevo-1 is the current stable release and packs a huge amount of features and is used by thousands of people across the world. The main features are listed here.

Main features

• Cross platform - runs on Linux, OSX and Windows (sort of ;) )^*8
• Watch & record television
• Pause live TV - DVB and analogue (with ivtv card)
• Support for multiple tuners - watch and record simultaneously.
• Separate recording server allows multiple backends and frontends on your network.
• Commercial detection/removal
• Play & backup^*1 DVD video
• Play any kind of file supported by mplayer/xine/ffmpeg including DIVX & MPEG4
• Watch the latest movie trailers^*2
• Retrieve video covers & information^*3
• Play & backup audio CDs and retrieve album track lists^*4 & covers^*5
• Play MP3/Wav/Ogg/Flac or any other audio supported by mplayer or xine
• Tune into Internet radio from around the world
• Read news headlines^*6 and the weather
• View and import images from a digital camera
• Play games^*7
• Control home automation equipment (lights, sockets etc.)

1. Requires encoding server plugin
2. Using the appletrailers plugin
3. Using the Internet movie database
4. Using the Free Internet CD database
5. Using Amazon web services
6. Using RSS technology
7. Includes Linux games, PSone, NES/SNES, Megadrive, Dreamcast, Mame and many more
8. Windows support is limited at the moment but Freevo is written in python so if you are a developer with Windows and python experience please join in and help. An email to the devel list would be the place to start. For a quick start you can just download Microsoft's Virtual PC and load up a Freevo Live CD on that!