WAY OT: TV DVR

Sep 10, 2010 7 Replies

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Karl Townsend 15 years ago

I got a TV tuner card with my new win7 PC. I'd like to record broadcast and satellite TV for later playback without commercials. I've been playing around with windows media center enough to see there must be something better.

Anyway, I'm looking for recommendations on what software to try. I see wikipedia has a listing for what's out there. See below. Anybody got experience with this and suggestions?

Karl

Windows There are several free digital video recording applications available for Microsoft Windows including GB-PVR, MediaPortal, and Orb (web-based remote interface).

There are also several commercial applications available including CyberLink, SageTV, Beyond TV, Showshifter, InterVideo WinDVR, the R5000-HD and Meedio (now a dead product - Yahoo! bought most of the company's technology and discontinued the Meedio line, and rebranded the software Yahoo! Go - TV, which is now a free product but only works in the U.S.[12]). Most TV tuner cards come bundled with software which allows the PC to record television to hard disk[13]. For example, Leadtek's WinFast DTV1000 digital TV card comes bundled with the WinFast PVR2 software, which can also record analog video from the card's composite video input socket.[14]

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Buerste 15 years ago

I use Sage and I like it but it uses a proprietary file format it comes with a free subscription channel guide built in. BeyondTV will cull commercials, Sage won't. Here's an informative website, I based my equipment purchases on questions I asked and what I learned here. I have a spare Hauppague 150 card.

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Karl Townsend 15 years ago

Thanks Tom,

I'll spend some time there. I'm a bit busy in the fall but hate to miss my ball games. Both baseball and football are 1/2 commercials.

P.S. Don't look good for the vikes

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Karl Townsend 15 years ago

Brett is unbelievable. he just turned it around with under 1 minute in the 1/2

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Jim Wilkins 15 years ago

7's Media Center seems like a throwback to DOS & Basic functionality with prettier controls, but after beating on it for a while I do have it recording and playing acceptably. It's still better than the older Hauppauge programs. You'd think the programmers who wrote them had never seen a good pulldown menu, or were told to write for clueless users.

I like having the controls and display in separate windows that you can view alternately, or as I do at home move the display onto a larger second monitor. WMC doesn't let the mouse move off the screen it's running on.

I should learn how to tolerate 7, otherwise I'd be trying MythTV.

jsw

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Karl Townsend 15 years ago

MythTV looks like the way to go if you're into Linix. I've just used WMC enough to see everything work. I'm not at all impressed, there's got to be better software.

Karl

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Snag 15 years ago

I use the Media Player instead . WMC has proven to be too unstable on the one box I have used it on (Intel D865PERL board with P4-HTT/Vista Ultimate) and that mobo designed to be a media center !

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Paul Hovnanian P.E. 15 years ago

Dump Windows and install MythTV

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