What is the best FREE TV tuner software?

[deadken]

I recently bought my daughter a Hauppauge Win TV HVR-1600 TV tuner. It has an analog and a digital tuner. My daughter REALLY likes American Idol and loves watching it on her PC and taking screen shots to post at the AI forum (previous tuner was a ATI TV Wonder Pro).

I got the HVR-1600, installed it and had a bit of a problem setting it up. I called the tech support number and the guy was pretty helpful and simply splitting the cable feed into both inputs let me get regular Cable channels and the Digital QAM channels (including Ch. 5 which has American Idol). This morning my daughter said that the TV stopped working last night (she leaves it on Nickolodean when she goes to bed).

I opened the program and it seemed to be fine this morning. I scanned for channels and started to 'edit' out the ones that weren't needed. Well, the software leaves a bit to be desired and then started to not work when changing channels. If you closed the program (with the 'X' in the top right corner, you didn't have to alt-f4) and then restarted the program all would be fine again... Until it went black again instead of going to the channel you selected.

I'd like to 'toy around' with some other TV tuner programs. I have heard good things about some TV tuner programs, but at $80 I am leary to try them. Are there any good free TV Tuner programs out there?

I am sorry for being long-winded, but I wanted to be as accurate as possible.

 

[vailr]

Try "AVS TV Box": http://www.avsmedia.com/TVBox/download.aspx
There's a free version of "ChrisTV" which may, or may not, work:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4385.html
"BeyondTV" and "SageTV" have free trial versions.

 

[deadken]

Thank you very much. I called Hauppauge tech support again today and went through a 'cleaning' process and re-installed everything. Let's see how well it works and how long it lasts.

I'm have already downloaded both programs. I will try them out tomorrow when I have some time to 'play' with the PC. I'm interested in seeing how well the free one works. I've heard that Beyond TV, Sage TV, and Snapstream are good but since they cost more then the card did, I've hesitant to even try them. If I could use one of those programs on 2 PCs that'd be great (since both my son and my daughter have tuner cards).

I'll try free first, then if necessary go to a trial version and decide if I'm gonna spend the extra bucks. I hope that the $30 program you suggested 'AVS TV Box' works well. That price is reasonable, I'll have to test some out and see.

Thanks again for the suggestions. If anyone else uses a free or not free program please let me know what you like about it and what you don't like about it.

 

[archcommus]

GB-PVR. If all you want to do is tune TV this will work fine and is free. If you want a guide and DVR features, it can also do this but it's not exactly easy setting up the guide services. If you're tech savvy though you can probably do it.

I use SageTV myself. I too was hesitant to spend $80 on it at first, but it was well worth the money. Extremely feature rich and a great community behind it. Lots of add-ons and the ability to customize pretty much anything you want. As you'd expect, free guide services, DVR functionalities, and also functions as a complete media center (for pictures, movies, music, etc.). This is something BeyondTV does NOT do without additional software.