A couple days ago, my cable was disconnected (long story). No internet, no TV. Kinda boring around the house, but I'm getting a lot of cleaning done.
I know that it's disconnected becuase my roomate was watching TV when it happened. He's tried with the vendor-supplied cable boxes and without them, but still no joy. We can pull down PBS and Fox though.
Well last night I installed the newest build of MC (no internet, so I had to download it at work, put it on my iPod, and carry it home that way -- did I mention that iPods make
outstanding portable hard drives?). So, on a lark, I fired up the TV tuner and told it to scan.
It found 69 channels.
Woooooooohooooooo!!! I don't know if it's MC or if it's my TV tuner (VisionTek Xtasy Everything), but I can still watch standard cable channels on my PC! It won't work on the cable-ready VCR downstairs, it won't work on the cable-ready TV, either. But MC's still kickin' it!
So, thanks to MC, I was able to watch the new episode of South Park on Comedy Central last night. Huzzah!!
Massive Respek,
Kurt
On a related topic, I tried some TV recording last night. Recording and timeshifting both produce
very poor results on my system. Terrible deinterlace lines, gaps, skips, pauses, and audio de-synchs on the recorded playback; all around bad quality on the timeshift.
I greatly suspect that it's my TV tuner card -- it's not the best in the world, especially when compared to "top-end" models like Hauppauge or eMused.
I guess I'm just asking to hear some users out there say "Yes, Kurt, these functions are working fine, and if you get a better tuner, you'll be able to enjoy them." Or, barring that, to hear some folks from the dev crew say "No worries, Kurt, it's not completely done yet, just sit tight."