I am a long time user of Chris-TV, a sofware that handles many analogue PCI TV cards – I use it with a Hauppauge’s dual tuner PVR-500.

I think this software product lost some of the attributes that once, years ago, made it the only viable solution for those who really wanted to use their PC TV cards. Since then, Hauppauge’s WinTV v6, which comes with the mentioned hardware, does nearly everything that Chris-TV does. The exception is that WinTV doesn’t allow the user to pick which tuner to use and also doesn’t permit to set the active audio/video decoders. Unfortunately for Hauppauge buyers and fortunately for Chris-TV, Hauppauge’s latest WinTV (version 7) is a total crap, oriented to a small set of DVB-S cards – and even for those… – doing a shameful job with the old analogue devices, so I keep using Chris-TV, despite some of its never solved issues, like no audio in some systems and the ability to bring any Windows to a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), when a wrong selection of audio and video decoders is picked.

What I never expected was that ZoneAlarm would warn me of a trojan with the latest Chris-TV installer. I think this is a false positive, although false positives are more of a “Panda Security” tradition (Panda Unsecurity?), than ZoneAlarm’s… Panda is so bad that this website was (is?) listed as xxx rated in their filters, despite unanswered e-mails warning them about the error.

This is the software world we live in.

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