AnySee Can’t See Encoded Television… Or Maybe It Can (After Praying)…
13 June 2007 in Rant | Comments enabled
Introduction
This is a short story of the problems I had when trying to install a pair of 
AnySee digital TV tuners on Windows XP. Since I started writing this, AnySee has come out with drivers that force 64-bit Windows Vista to run in “Test Mode” thus enabeling unsigned drivers to run under Vista. However, I can’t get both terrestial and cable tuners to co-exist under Vista, and the Anysee viewer software is damn slow at times in Vista which (more or less) forces me to reboot into Windows XP for watching TV or use my belowed Terratec Cinergy T² to watch those free-to-air channels.
The Kill (Not As Told By 30 Seconds From Mars)
I bought a pair of brand new AnySees digital TV tuners just recently for viewing pay-TV on my PC for a very reasonable price. One for the terrestrial and another for the cable DTV networks. What is “a reasonable price” you ask? In my book it is: cheaper than a set-top digibox with integrated recording capabilities and conax card reader for those old CRT TVs – which will be rendered outdated very soon.
I knew that the AnySees wouldn’t work in the 64-bit version of Windows Vista that I’m running, but I had a copy of Windows XP Pro running on another partition that should be capable get the drivers installed. Proceeding to installing the cable AnySee first went quite fine. No errors, just hilarious engrish message when everything was done: “You should reboot a computer”. Right… Let me run to my neighbor and restart their computer, that should right about do it, no? 
You Want QAM With That?
Well, firing up the program without restarting worked just fine, as I suspected. Getting the program to find the channels was another dilemma. I don’t know what the reason is, but cheap set-top digiboxes are more than capable of finding the channels on cable TV. However, AnySee and Technotrend (which made some tuners for Hauppauge for a while) require you — the consumer — to find out:
- the bitrate
- the QAM
- and each mux frequency
to get those channels found and working on your digital TV cable tuner. Strangly, this has never been the case for the terrestial digital TV tuners as far as I have seen.
To me, this isn’t scary, but to the Joe Average Consumer this looks broken. My cable company VLP (in Finnish) or VLT (in Swedish) has a page listing all the gruesome details that you need for digital TV tuners on computers: here in Finnish and here in Swedish. Just don’t get too dizzy with all those large numbers, ok? 
Fast-forward to the TV channels scanned and working: things looked good. The picture quality was reasonably good, but could get better if I were allowed to choose the MPEG 2 decoders (like FFmpeg’s or Intervideo’s software decoders) but no, that isn’t possible. I inserted the card that my cable company requires one to have for some free channels — that you still pay for in the form of a stupid card fee — and waited for Eurosport to become decoded… and waited … … waited … Nope, nothing happened. :S I triple checked that the card was read properly by the program, and it was, the card number and the subscription data.
I knew that the card was working since I had tried it out using a borrowed digibox for the old TV sets. “Oh well”, I thought, “let’s try the other AnySee then”. After installing and this time restarting the computer, the terrestrial AnySee was up and a-running. Alas, the PlusTV card for the terrestrial AnySee rendered no decoded picture. At this point, I did what most other Finns would do: condemned the tuners to the extremly warm depths of the inner earth out of pure frustration.
Keep On Trying!
Well, giving up is for the weak. I decided to uninstall everything: the viewer software and drivers for the Anysees. Restarted (just to be sure) and started reinstalling all at once this time: first the cable driver and then the terrestrial. After the gruesome long waiting period and waiting for the channels to get found, the damn cards worked on both Anysees! 
Alas, I can’t have them both connected to the computer and view both terrestrial and cable television at the same time since the AnySee viewer program gets them confused. That could be easily (?) fixed by the coders who make the viewer program, but I don’t believe that they read my blog anyways.
The alternative
Another option was to buy FireDTV firewire based digital TV tuners (that supposedly support HDTV already) but since my Acer Ferrari 4000 has only a 4-pin firewire port, that meant that I would have had to bring along another charger for the digibox and furthermore buy a common interface card so that my pay-TV cards would work in the digibox. (Yes, I’m using the word “digibox” to describe digital television box, which they essentially are.)
So buying two FireDTV tuners would mean (in the worst case) that I’d have to have to use 2 additional chargers, get 2 conax CI card (roughly 50€ a card), and at least one 4-pin to 6-pin firewire card. Not as comfortable as just bringing a USB to USB mini cable, which I tend to usually have along for my Nokia N91 and digital TV.
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