Watching TV on my PC

flogen

ok, I have a TV card and everything, and Ive gotten the cable plugged from the PC to the Wall (and its a good connection), but the PC just wont pick up the stations.

THe software Im using is called powercinema, it came with the PC (a Medion).

can anyone help me here? know of anything I can do to fix it up?

Flogen

pclancy

are u tryin to pick up terristrial RTE over the roof aerial or cable? Remember irish stations use different frequencies then england so english tvs/videos/tv cards wont work unless they're adapted to irish frequencies. (I think)

Villain

Yea UK tuner will only pick up UHF, but TV3 and TNAG4 are on UHF so you should be able to get them, RTE is on VHF.

Was the card with the pc or did you buy it seperately??

flogen

yeah, it came with the PC.

It wont pick up anything when i do a search, Irish or English.... It connected to my Cable box in the wall.... when i plug a tv into the socket i get all the normal channels (rte, bbc, tv3, utv, mtv etc)

Flogen

esquier

Have you installed the drivers for the card, what make of card is it?. As far as I can see Powercinema is not suitable for tv tuner cards. Try d/loading and installing Dscaler here, it`s less than 1mb:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/deinterlace/DScaler401.exe.

flogen

yeah,
I dl that file, but its not up to much... maybe Im missing something (my card isnt on the list btw, so maybe thats the problem)

its strange that powercinema wouldnt be for tv, its all set up for it...when i go into it i have an option of my tv or my radio, in my tv theres the whole tv setup.... wierd

Flogen

luckat

Try scanning for UK stations; I have a TV card in my sad unused PC, a Hauppage one, and its makers don't seem to have heard about Irish independence. They set all our stations under UK.

flogen

so tell the pc to search from the Uk rather than Ireland?
might try that.......

Flogen

flogen

thanks for the help everyone, i got it working (well actually it just started to work all of a sudden.... and on both Uk and Ireland settings.)

cheers

Flogen

vibe666

if you're going to be wanting to use it to record stuff, i can heartily recommend FLY TV2000, it does a great job, is very configurable and has a timer record function so you can set and forget it to record stuff while you're out.

if you're interested let me know and i'll give you details of everything you need to get the most out of it all.

rubberduckey

Hi Vibe666, I'm interested in FLY TV2000. Could you give me a rundown...it'd be most
appreciated. Thanks

vibe666

you can get it HERE. it's a 30 day trial, but i can honestly say, that if you intend to use your card more than 'every now and again' it's well worth the cash. probably one of the best $30 i've spent on software.

if you only want to record stuff so its watchable then just use the divx 5.x codec and play around with it until you find something that suits you, but for decent results you're gonna need a pretty good processor & hard drive to get the most from it all. (P4 1.5Ghz, 256mb RAM, and at least 40gb of spare HD space, preferably on a seperate drive or partition to WIndows).

for better quality you'll need to have a fast hard disk and a lossless or high quality lossy video codec like PicVideo MJPEG or Huffyuv and at the absolute bare minimum 40GB of free space on a seperate fast HD dedicated to capturing video if you intend to record something like 2 or more hours of video.

make sure your HD's are all freshly defragmented or empty and there is nothing running in the background to slow things down.

set up Fly2000 with all your channels (if it's NTL and you aren't getting anywhere with the autoscan i have the frequencies written down at home, so i can post them tonight when i get in for you, and you can add channels manually).

then you need to configure your video codec to record stuff.

for simple point and click recording you'll have to experiment to see how much strain your PC can take before it starts dropping frames, which we don't want.

you'll need a recording resolution which will be half PAL size (which i think is something like 352x288 pixels or similar, but again, i have it at home) and 25fps (again, standard PAL framerate) and then decide on what ratio of quality/speed of divx compression works best for you before your PC starts dropping those precious frames. the divx 5.x codec has a quality wizard qhich you can use to make things easier so give that a go at different settings and see what you get.

don't worry about the audio for now, we'll fix that later, as compressing the audio in realtime while you're compressing the video will quite often leave you with the video and audio out of sync, which ruins it (there's a fairly easy way of fixing this which i'll go into later on).

OK, set a folder for temp video on your recording hard drive and set fly2000 to save video and audio in that folder.

don't worry too much about the other settings yet, we'll concentrate on getting it working for now, and tweak the other settings later.

OK, pick a channel with a good clear signal and hit record!

first off lets stick to 60 seconds of video, so stop once you get to the 1 minute mark on the recording. check the status in fly2000 to see if there was any dropped frames (0 dropped is great, but more than 10 means there's a big problem somewhere). what were your CPU and Disk usage percentages? both should not be hitting 100% at all or you're going to have problems. if they are we can change some settings and see how we go from there.

OK, check your temp video folder and click on the video file to play it (usually in media player cos if it works there it should work on any other player). is it OK?

Let me know how you do, and I'll take it from here when i get home. back to work now anyway. good luck!

Good resources for TV related shenanigans are here:

http://www.tv-cards.com

http://www.dvdrhelp.com

http://www.aussievideosearch.com

http://www.doom9.org

http://www.divx-digest.com

http://www.afterdawn.com/


edit: added some links.