What is turntv?

TurnTV lets you select any rectangular part of your Windows desktop and watch it live as if it were being played through an old CRT television connected by composite video cable. Instead of a sharp, clean modern display, the selected area gets redrawn with the color bleeding, scanlines, static, and other visual quirks that came from analog TV signals decades ago. The tool is built with the Godot game engine and works through a two step visual effect: first it processes the image the way an old analog broadcast signal would, then it simulates how that signal looked on an actual CRT screen, including small imperfections like screen static, tuning errors, and slightly imperfect color alignment. This effect pipeline was adapted from a retro-style game currently being developed by the same author, and it borrows ideas from a couple of other open-source projects that recreate old television and radio signal behavior, though no code was copied directly from them. To use it, you start the program, drag a box over the part of your screen you want to display, and a new window opens showing that area in the CRT style. From there you can click to pick a new area, drag to move it, use the mouse wheel to zoom, and right click to open a settings panel with over fifty adjustable effects, plus three ready-made presets for different looks and performance levels. The heavier visual effects can slow down older or integrated graphics cards, especially at large window sizes, so the README gives a specific order of settings to turn off first if the effect runs too slowly on your machine. TurnTV only runs on Windows, since it relies on Windows-specific screen capture. A ready-to-run executable is available from the project's Releases page, and the README provides a checksum so you can verify the downloaded file has not been tampered with. Running it from source instead requires Godot 4.6 or newer.