World Cup live on your PC in 5 easy steps

1) DOWNLOAD

Download the TVU player here.

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. Sometimes only one network carries a game; sometimes its on more than one.

5) GET THE MATCH SCHEDULE

Once you've got TVU working, go to footballstreaming.info and endure the complicated shttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifignup 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.

This 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.

TECH QUESTIONS?

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.

MAC USERS can supposedly run TVU on Virtual PC.