Without a question, 2020 has seen an increase in streaming in general while everyone prefers to work remotely to stay safe.
Not only for new movie releases, users also prefer streaming TV channels instead of traditional DTH or cable connections.
For the same reason, you may want to explore some great services that allow you to watch live TV channels on Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Here, I focus on two great apps that allow you to do just that.
Hypnotix & FreetuxTV: Open source applications for watching live TV channels
Hypnotix and FreetuxTV are two of the most impressive GUI applications for Linux that allow you to watch a variety of live TV channels on Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
Basically, with these programs installed, you can watch publicly available (free) live TV channels on your Linux desktop. You also get the ability to record and play some of your movie collections offline and perform a couple of other tasks as a complete entertainment tool.
In this article, I will give you an overview of both tools before you try them.
1. Using Hypnotix to watch live TV
Hypnotix is developed and maintained by the Linux Mint team. It is brand new as of the update of this article.
It allows you to browse and stream live TV channels from a wide range of countries. You can certainly add your source for channels but by default Free-IPTV With free legal content available to the public.
You can also add your movie collection to play and enjoy.
Install Hypnotix on Linux
Hypnotix is still fairly new. You can find the DEB file from the GitHub releases to divide. You may want to read our guide on installing it from a DEB file if you don’t know.
You can also find it in the AUR for Arch Linux users. If you encounter any dependency issues on Ubuntu 18.04 or Linux Mint 19, you can download the following Python 3 package to fix it:
You can explore more about its features and usage in our separate coverage of Hypnotix IPTV app.
2. Using FreetuxTV on Linux
FreetuxTV hasn’t seen a major update in years but it seems to work as expected. You can add multiple channels and groups and add your own sources as well.
You also get the ability to record and control video as you can see from the screenshot above. Feel free to check out their GitHub page for more information.
Install FreetuxTV on Linux
For Ubuntu based systems, you just have to add and install the PPA by following the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freetuxtv/freetuxtv
sudo apt update
sudo apt install freetuxtvFor other Linux distributions, you can build it from source and install it by following the instructions on the GitHub page.
Which one should you choose to install?
Both options work well enough – but FreetuxTV lists channels/groups by language. It may come in handy.
Either way, something Hypnotix developed by Linux Mint is also a great option that filters channels by countries and also allows you to use it as a media center portal.
How about watching live TV on Linux? What do you use to watch live TV? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!