Recording from a TV Tuner card

A few years ago my television fried itself and could not be repaired. Due to a lack of space and finance to get another small television like what I had, I got myself a TV Tuner card for my PC. Since I already have a screen and the antenna, I just needed the tuner part.

Normally the video recorder (tapes) was set to record shows from television while I was at work and then I watched them on my Television/PC later. Due to age, the VCR started wrestling with the tapes instead of recording the WWE wrestling that I normally watch and other things.

PowerVCR 2 version 3.0 which came with my TV tuner card ended up being slow, bloated and mostly useless. It also took more than one minute to start up. Some other application came with the TV tuner card which doesn't look pretty but runs well and supports the light-weight remote (with the all-important mute button). Except that this application doesn't have a recording feature. With my old RivaTNT card was an application with could also use the TV Tuner, but that ended up being totally unstable and only had brief manual recording.

Recently I got PVR Plus which came with another card, that has got sheduling to record shows, runs fast and stable, starts up quick and looks nice. Now the problem is that it records in MPG format (makes sense to do that), and a lot of modern media players just simply cannot handle jumping to a specific location inside of an MPG video. I tried Media Player Classic, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player 10 and eventually I found that the very minimalistic BSPlayer can actually do what the rest could not.

It has taken me now a bit more than two years to finally get something that allows me to replace my old faulty VCR.