For those of you stuck at the office without a TV, you can watch all the games and check the upcoming schedule, too. If you have technical problems with TVU, see the gHacks forum discussion. Don't email me with questions; I won't be able to answer you because of my schedule.

1) DOWNLOAD

Download the TVU player.

http://www.tvunetworks.com/downloads/index.htm

2) INSTALL

Run the installer program from your desktop.

TVUPlayer_1.5.12_20060209.exe

3) LAUNCH

Look for the TVU icon added to your desktop and double-click it.

4) WATCH!

TVU has a channel selector on its left-hand side. Double click (and wait patiently) to watch a channel. ESPN2, ABC, CCTV-1 and CCTV-5 carry most of the games among them. Sometimes only one network carries a game; sometimes it's on three as is the Saudi Arabia v Tunisia match I'm watching as I type. I find I like the Chinese-language commentators because I can ignore the words and listen to the sound of the crowd and the emotion in the announcer's voice.

5) GET THE MATCH SCHEDULE

Once you've got TVU working, go to footballstreaming.info. You'll need to sign up, then login, then submit a first post ("USA! USA!") before you can read the real forums.

Below is the URL for this week's schedule. Times are in BST, British Summer Time, which is GMT+1. In the US, subtract 5 hours for Eastern and 8 for Pacific time.

http://www.footballstreaming.info/forums/viewtopic.php?t=806

TECH QUESTIONS?

Don't email me! gHacks has a running thread on TVU problems. The most common problem is "Player cannot be initialized," which seems to be caused by the video being blocked by an office network firewall or proxy. They're still looking for a workaround last time I checked.

MAC USERS You can supposedly run TVU on Virtual PC, but I haven't tried it. Macworld is still trolling for a Mac-native method.

Link to this entry Posted on 6/14/06; 10:04:07 AM