Watching the 2006 World Cup on your PC

World Cup live on your PC in 5 easy steps

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. It's tricky to find the link and get past their anti-robot system that makes you wait and then type stuff, but hang in there. It'll take about 2 minutes. Note the file is named "tuv" but the player is named TVU.

http://rapidshare.de/files/22635869/tuv.rar.html

2) INSTALL

If your PC doesn't know what to do with an RAR file, install WinRAR and use it to unpack the RAR archive file tuv.rar.

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_file.htm

3) LAUNCH

Install and launch the TVU player.

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 its 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) MATCH SCHEDULE

Get the schedule. Once you've got TVU working, go to footballstreaming.info and endure the complicated signup process that subjects you to noisy Flash ads and requires you to submit a first post ("USA! USA!") to prove you're a human 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

USA v Italy is Saturday at 3pm EDT, on ABC only.

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 trolling for a better way.