I picked up a TV tuner card, “vixs pure tv-u 48b0 ntsc atsc combo” and have installed it in a Dell Dimension B110 system running XP SP2.
The drivers have been installed successfully. The card is connected to the cable TV coax, the one I disconnected from my standalone TV, so I know it is working.
How can I watch TV on my computer? After installation of the VIXS drivers, no new icon(s) showed up on my desktop, no other programs are on the install CD, no new programs are on the program list. Windows Media Player has no option to “watch TV”. Do I need an entirely new program to use the card? (It’s OEM, so no documentation came with it.)
Have you checked “Add and Remove Programs” to see if it has installed? (If it had installed the program properly, it should have asked you to ‘scan for available channels’.)
The vixs site doesn’t have any downloads or support. The CD that came with the card doesn’t have any programs other than driver installs.
Is there a generic “TV display” freeware program that can use this card? I was hoping to be able to record off of digital cable stations, as this card claims to have a digital QAM tuner.
The system->device list shows the device as working and enabled.
I’ll second the recommendation for Beyond TV. I used to use it in my XP PC and it’s quite nice, better than the software that came with the ATI All-In-Wonder card I was using as a TV tuner card.
I gave dscaler a whirl, and it displayed channel 2 in high quality, so I know the signal is there and the card is working.
But dscaler won’t change channels. If I click on next or previous channel, it says, “no channels”. I tried scanning for channels, but it only went up to 158. The only channels I care about are 980…999, so that won’t work. (The QAM tuner circuit should handle the 980…99 numbers.)
Then the dscaler program closed itself everytime I executed it, so for now, I’ll be trying something else. You can’t configure a program that won’t stay running long enough to click on something.
Tried the Beyond TV setup, which took over a half-hour and then told me that I would have to buy a card to make it work. Uninstalling it removed an entire directory of stuff that wasn’t part of the installation.
I have PowerDirector installed and have used it frequently for a year on this computer. It recognizes the TV card in both analog and digital modes, but it won’t change channels. Scanning for channels results in a program wipeout every time.
I tried another viewer from MajorGeeks, but it only saw 158 channels also and didn’t see any audio (nothing so far has given me audio from the TV source). I might try running the cable thru a converter box to see if I can get the 980…999 range, but if I have to use the converter box, that’s going to be more gadgets on the desk and more remotes to have to handle.
The channel numbers that you will use will not likely be the same as the channels displayed on the cable box. Once you are sure you have it in QAM mode, the channels will be something like 78.1, 78.2 etc. And to make things even better, I have Comcast and they remap (ie, the channel number that is NBC HD changes.them all the time. Like several times a day.
It makes it utterly impossible to record anything off of the unencrypted QAM channels, and fairly difficult to even find what you want to watch in real-time.
You my have hit on part of the problem. How do I make sure the tuner is in QAM mode? Nothing seems to pop up in any configuration setup that relates.
The channels as shown on the cable-supplier-supplied-converter box don’t show fractional numbers (they do sometimes on the screen, not on the box). The cable supplier (Charter) says the channels are 980…999, which matches the converter box. (HD isn’t in this equation.) digital TVs show 980…999, according to others.
I have a printed channel card from Charter with the numbers on it (980…999). I’m still unsure if the converter box is needed, but I have been told that a QAM tuner is definitely needed.