tv-tuner. argh!

[InCreator]

argh.
It's 3rd month since I bought Hauppauge! WinTV + radio tuner card. It's 3rd month I'm swearing and stomping feet.

Fact is...
There's no software to watch tv.
Card works, and works just fine.

There's a program I used to watch tv, called Snowshifter.

Problem is - it's 14-or so day trial. Demo cannot be installed twice, with year 2004 going on with all these nice "no internet, no program - ha" copy protections systems... And there's definetly no way I'm going to buy two things just to use the thing I already paid for! Plus, no software store in Estonia sells TV-tuner software anyway and internet-buy with all this costy shipping and taxing would cost more than I neither could or wish to pay.

After all, I paid already. I'd like to watch tv now.

Ah, of course. There's some official software that came with the Tv-card.
But...
So called "program" is something that happens when you lock 9-years old retarded kid into a windowless room with some strong drugs plus a computer with Visual Basic installed onto it. For six weeks.

Tuner format? Is it DK, I, L or BG? How the hell shoud I know?!
Do I have to know? I'm just asking to wacth tv, that's all. I don't want to know.

Video format? NTSC, PAL (with many letters next to it)

Of course, "Select by country" thing exists there.
Of course, Estonia is somewhere at Southern Pole and there's no TV's there, only people living in igloos and eating their kids.
So, of course there's only about 20-30 countries listed and none of them starts with letter "E".

Okay. After sending them few e-mails, trying - and getting it to work with SnowShifter (just few clicks there), I finally found out that TV in Estonia and video format PAL B are related.

The dumbass at Hauppauge finally responded, coming to same conclusion. Only that... there's no selectable PAL B in WinTV2000 program. (Though almost all other letters are represented, from A to PAL NCOMBO). Yeah, the dumbass said "Estonia? shuld be PAL B" and advised me to run their Prodinfo program, gave a link. That's all I heard from them. PRogram just displays some as sick and nondecodable info which is of no use for me, neither won't do anything good. Drivers at all of their support pages (mirrors too) make me believe that "latest" drivers are absolutely "latest" ONLY if they're updated in June 2004. Or even 2002 (TV-watch program).

Okay, to cut long and miserable story short, I'm asking for any names and/or links to freeware or at least well-working shareware TV-Tuner programs or any feedback of other people having similar experience and their solutions for the problem.
Thank you for your time.

[YOke]

Ahh, yes! The wonders of the TV-cards... I remember it well.

Check around on this page. It has some different TV viewing and capturing programs with varying levels of user friendlyness. Chris TV looked promising. It supports the Happauge card and the Lite version is free, but has no capture functions.
Hope this gets you closer to learning to live with your TV card. I've got my fingers crossed for you!

[InCreator]

oooh, didn't expect so fast and so working help!

Chris-TV (heh, teh name) - was just as automatic as I needed. It detected both country and all these one-letter-long settings by itself, I didn't have to tell it where i live!

Lot's of setuo by hand on picture quality, but that's not even worth mentioning, I'm still a game developer and setting up random stuff is everyday life or something, it was just international tv/video standards I didn't know or either give heck about.
It works-works-works!



I love you, Yoke.