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Freecom DVB-T (ART 25452)
Just a record of my experience with Win7 and this device:
Summary is that I did get the drivers to work OK and ProgDVB is so far the best software for this on win7: ProgDVB
This is on my Toshiba Portege M100 Laptop with 82855 Graphics, so very much less than ideal setup. Might try the DVB-T on my desktop to check whether the Media Center then works fine with it, but time is tight now.
Drivers:
I actually used the XP drivers and installed in safe mode with driver signing turned off. Had to install do the install twice in safe mode. 1st time round failed. 2nd time installed OK and was fine on normal boot. Not tried the vista drivers.. I tried to install them later, but win7 said I already had the latest, and the dlls etc look the same in terms of versions etc for the 32-bit, so presumably it's the 64 bit that's different.
XP BDA Drivers here: Freecom Technologies is the specialist in multimedia connections and storage solutions for PC, Apple Macintosh and Home entertainment.
Vista Drivers Here: Freecom Technologies is the specialist in multimedia connections and storage solutions for PC, Apple Macintosh and Home entertainment.
Media Center
Recognised the device fine, and went on to scan for channels fine, and picks up all the channels great for my area.... but the problems came when actually viewing the TV or for that matter any DVD.
Got the old classic: "files needed to display video are missing..."
Cyberlink PowerDVD7 is installed and works fine with DVDs, so the decoders are there OK. I suspect it's the old intel 82855 driver which isn't compatible.
ProgDVB:
Loaded this up and set it to pick up the DVB-T as a "Generic BDA Device" rather than "Microsoft BDA Compatible", and all works pretty well. Set it to use the Cyberlink mpeg2 decoder(for recordings) and the WMV9 renderer for live TV.
Channel switch is a tad slow, but not too bad. Nice little TV and PVR application this and pretty lightweight... and the std version is Free!
Summary:
Media Center didn't go well, but with DVDs not playing though there (and being fine with Media Player and cyberlink it seems to all go back to the 82855 video drivers being incompatible with Media Center rather than the Freecom device itself.
ProgDVB turns out to be a really great free app for basic watching and recording TV. I also tried GB-PVR and MediaPortal, both of which are pretty heavyweight really for a laptop such as this.
If anyone has managed to get the 82855 video drivers behaving with Media Center then I'd be interested to know.
Best regards
Maxihod
Hardware:
Tosh Portege M100, 1.2GHz Pentium M, 1.75GB RAM
OS: Win7 Ultimate RTM