kWinTV is a TV application for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) based on the Video4Linux interface. kWinTV allows you to watch TV in a window on your PC screen using a TV card which is supported by a Video4Linux - based driver. Since kWinTV is (almost fully) integrated into the KDE it gives you some additional comfort and features like an easy to use User Interface, easy configuration and others.

kWinTV started as xwintv in December 1997 as a TV application for the bttv-driver based on Qt, the C++ GUI application framework by Troll Tech. In July 1998 xwintv was ported to the K Desktop Environment (KDE) v1.0 and was renamed to kWinTV.

The developement of kWinTV ended with a quick port to KDE 2.0 when I finished my diploma thesis and began to work for a VOIP company. Somewhen in 2001, George Staikos, one of the KDE developers, deceided to continue the developement on kWinTV. He added kWinTV to the kdenonbeta cvs tree and started to rewrite it from scratch together with some other coders, based on a small application, QtVision, he worte for a contest by Troll Tech. After the first alpha release I hope to continue to develope and contribute to the new kWinTV.

Some of the features of kWinTV:

• Easy to use GUI (Qt/KDE).
• Almost all is free configurable.
• Easy channel setup.
• AutoScan function to scan for all channels of a given country (frequency table).
• Supports frequency tables for several countries (Europe, USA, Japan and many others).
• Features like full-screen-size, fixing aspect ratio after resizing etc.
• Capture screen shots to files (currently, JPEG and PNM are supported).
• Capture video streams to files (AVI, PNM, JPEG, raw data) in several resolutions and color depths with a given frame rate (up to 30 fps on fast systems).
• Supports use of a Infrared Rremote Control (see LIRC package) with an easy to use configuration dialog (maybe I will release my easy to use C++ classes (works like kaccel) supporting the dialog and managing the connection to the lirc daemon somedays. Interested? Mail me!).
• Supports audio mixer for soundcard and TV card (if the TV card has a mixer...).