[blue4paper]

yeah i was wondering if you could put a parental advisory on TVtime, cause we got the tv tuner card and everything but my dad was telling my if there isn't a parental guidances or channel blocker i cant use it.

Or does anyone know any other software that picks up tv tuner cards and is able to disable channels? I'm not looking for something like mythtv though. Just actually tv stuff.

Thanks~!

[RobLinux]

No obvious solution it seems. Suppose there were parental controls in TVtime, as you have root access, it'd be possible for you to bypass them. After all you probably could install TVtime onto a bootable CD-ROM (which would bypass Windows controls to).

One suggestion though, which might suffice.

If the issue is more about not accessing the TV late evening, then may be you could use groups and/or device permissions to restrict access at night, using cron(8). But the job would have to terminate any currently running TV process, as the permissions are checked on an open, not read/write to already opened device file. That type of scheme, was used to restrict games(6) to off peak hours.

Hope that at least, now you know your question wasn't totally ignored, just don't have a definite solution.

[blue4paper]

Ah Thanks rob, also i was wondering how come when i try to run my "Ultratv USB" (the tv program used for windows) that it says "image title failed" on wine?

I recopied everything but it didn't work. If i could get avertv working then i would have no problem. I've googled several times, but i was having trouble installing .tar.gz files for the drivers :S

[RobLinux]

At WINE HQ, there's a list of supported applications. It is not obvious what will work in WINE without trouble and what won't.

For instance, I've recently discovered Internet Explorer is WINE-able (useful for Web Developers mostly, perhaps Users if they have to use non-FF site). An expensive Chess program I have, which was a Win95 one and should be simple, doesn't.

So check that, but don't let your Dad see that this is pointless as you can circumvent the controls very simply...

On the original issue, as noone had any "real" suggestions, I think you ought to ask your question on the TV time mailing list or forum. Perhaps if your "Parental Control" scheme is simple enough, some developer will pop up and say "Easy..." and you will get a patch to add the requriment; though expecting it to be GUI controllable is unrealistic.

What I mean is , if certain channels are barred after 9pm or all day, or all channels... It'd likely be simple to use a script to check an access control, called from the application, that used some simple text file format (prefarably XML with view to later GUI support). But what you have to understand is that this stuff is really rather broken, in the context of a Free OS, so may not interest "real" developers.

PS. I wonder what your Dad watches that he don't want you to see? :lol:

[blue4paper]

lol, well thanks, but i've actually almost got mythtv working, just having some trouble with the backend, but it reads my tv tuner card fine. But thanks for the help

Thanks again

[RobLinux]

You're welcome! Better ask him then!

Does mythtv do the parental stuff? When I first tried to find some info about parental controls; there really wasn't anything much, so I'd like to know for future reference.