FRANKFURT (dpa) – Television is heading for the Internet. Most TVs, though, are not ready for the transition, since they simply aren’t designed to receive transmissions over the world computer network.
So computers will need to fill the gap for those wanting to watch films or TV on the Web. “In order to receive an Internet TV programme in reasonable quality, one should ideally have a fast DSL connection, because the so-called broadband connections are best equipped to handle the massive streams of data,” says Anja Siebolds, editor responsible for networld-tv.de at Tomorrow New Media AG, in Hamburg, Germany.But for TV viewing on the PC to be fun at all, the hardware has to meet certain minimum requirements. Torge Kern, the man responsible for the multimedia section of the entertainment magazine “Tomorrow,” gives this advice: “If in addition to television you want to watch and save video clips, your hard drive has to have at least 10 to 20 gigabytes of free space.”Beyond this, he recommends at least 128 megabytes of memory (RAM), “so that the computer isn’t brought to its knees.” The processor should be at least a Pentium III with a clock speed no lower than 500 MHz.In order to make television signals viewable on the computer, users will need a multimedia player. Possibilities include Realplayer 8.0 (www.real.com/player), the Windows Media Player (www.windowsmedia.com/download), or Apple’s Quicktime for Macintosh users (www.apple.com/quicktime/download).These programmes are all available for free. “It’s also wise to acquire the Flash programmes off the Web,” says Torge Kern. This software enables animation and moving images. The most widely distributed Flash plug-in is Macromedia Flash 5 (www.macromedia.com).Today, not only video clips but also entire films can be downloaded from the Internet onto your home PC. With the help of the Limewire software (www.limewire.com) – a Napster-like swap bazaar – films and photos can be downloaded.“New video formats are making possible a significantly better picture quality while using less hard drive space than in past years,” indicates Volker Zota, editor at the c’t computer magazine. “Two hours worth of video now require no more than 600 megabytes of hard drive space.”At the moment this is only achievable through a hacked Microsoft Codec known as DivX;-), which has become the standard on the DVD hacker scene. It can be found at sites such as
