I have had a Freecom DVB-T USB stick since August 2006 and used it quite successfully at an address on the fringe of the Hastings service area. I have now moved to Nottingham and get a good signal from the Waltham (Melton Mowbray) transmitter - but the device fails to tune any channel in MultiplexB, ie BBC FOUR, CBeebies and the main BBC Radio channels. My STB has no problem on the same aerial. I had not rescanned the Hastings channels recently, so I am not sure if I would now have the MxB failure there, (perhaps because there are now more channels packed in and the hardware or scanning software can no longer cope) or whether I have a more local problem. I have the same problem whether I am using the supplied Arcsoft software under XP or Mythtv (or scandvb) under Linux. Enquiries to Freecom and on linux mailing lists have not yet produced any responses.
Has anyone else using the Freecom stick been unable to rescan MxB recently? Anyone wanting BBC Radios 1, 2, 3 or 4 would have needed to do that last week. Thanks in advance. Does anyone know if it's possible to view two channels at once using the freecom dvb usb tuner? Perhaps with special software?
I use AltDVB with my Freecom stick, it will let me watch up to 4 channels at once, provided they are all on the same mux. It's very good software actually. You need to be using the BDA driver; once you get past the spreadsheet style interface, it's great for viewing, timeshifting, analyzing muxes, etc. Only thing is you need to get mpeg filters installed and such like; you may already have filters installed on your machine that AltDVB can tap into. I use AltDVB with my Freecom stick, it will let me watch up to 4 channels at once, provided they are all on the same mux. It's very good software actually. You need to be using the BDA driver; once you get past the spreadsheet style interface, it's great for viewing, timeshifting, analyzing muxes, etc.
Only thing is you need to get mpeg filters installed and such like; you may already have filters installed on your machine that AltDVB can tap into. Thanks, got it from here (The.zip files on the site don't include BDA support btw). I bought a Freecom DVB-T dated April 2007 in May from YoYo Tech, just off Tottenham Court Road, and have been fairly happy with it. The Arcsoft software is poor and needed the configuration files hacking just to get it working reasonably well, but some channels such as BBC1 would have glitches in recordings at 28 and 58 minutes past the hour. I've tried other software such as Mediaportal, but I found it slow and clumsy. ProgDVB looked promising, but it has two problems: some features are only in the premium version and, oh, just attempting to install it result s in an instantaneous reboot. So thanks to Phil Elliott for pointing out AltDVB.
Being able to record, say, C4, C4+1, More4, E4, ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4, all at the same time, starting and stopping at will, puts the other software to shame. AltDVB requires a bit more effort to set up and is occasionally flaky, but after six months of other software and two weeks with AltDVB, it's now my DVB software of choice. It does seem to have a habit of selecting the wrong audio stream when scanning for channels, but it only takes a double click per channel to fix. One thing: AltDVB produces TS - transport stream - files which are extended MPG2 files.
The free MPEG StreamClip from can convert them to 'MPeg2 with MP2 audio'. If you've recorded an entire transport stream - that'll require about 8GBs per hour!
- you'll need to select the relevant audio and video streams. I tried ALTdvb and gave up.
It worked fine but wasnt very user friendly. This was some time ago. The nearest that I found to a decent bit of TV software was DVBViewer. There is a one off payment of £10 and this gives you access to the full version download and members forum section (which is very active). DVBViewer lets me tune both the Freecom DVB-T card and the Sky Star (freesat) tv card.
The channel list changes between both cards easily. As for recording whole muxes, DVBViewer did not allow me to do this. One better piece of software that I did find that has the functionality of ALTdvb and almost the userbility of DVBViewer is Kaffeine. Unfortuanatley its not windows based. Kaffeine allows me to record whole muxes from both tv cards at the same time. Now I can really clog up my harddrive! Kaffeine and DVBViewer both can also stream tv across the network.
The advantage of DVBViewer is that a remote user can change channels (provided the favorites listing is the same on both pc's). Kaffeine only streams and does not allow channel changing. Tv picture quality on Kaffeine beats any windows based tv software hands down. With deinterlacing turned on and using high cpu power then even Five looks very good.
If I was using windows I would recommend DVBViewer. Its a very good bit of software that is not well known (I don't know why).
I have been using my Freecom (Sep 2005 version) stick with the Yakumo drivers on my WinXP laptop for some time. Now I have a Vista Business (32 bit) notebook and am trying out the Freecom stick with that. I have got the Vista BDA drivers from the Freecom website and installed those. I am trying to find some BDA viewer which likes my setup. I have tried ProgDVB v5 and it can see the Freecom stick and does a scan but reception is dreadful and it crashes a lot.
Is this a problem with the drivers or progDVB or some compatibility issues? Anyone got any nice combinations I can try? I have been using my Freecom (Sep 2005 version) stick with the Yakumo drivers on my WinXP laptop for some time. Now I have a Vista Business (32 bit) notebook and am trying out the Freecom stick with that.
I have got the Vista BDA drivers from the Freecom website and installed those. I am trying to find some BDA viewer which likes my setup. I have tried ProgDVB v5 and it can see the Freecom stick and does a scan but reception is dreadful and it crashes a lot.
Is this a problem with the drivers or progDVB or some compatibility issues? Anyone got any nice combinations I can try? I don't have a Freecom stick, but I did always used to have problems with ProgDVB 5 - try using ProgDVB 4 instead; it solved my problems.
Well as this is the official thred I thought I woudld post here Ok I have one of these Freecom DVB sticks and I just cant get it to work on this Lappy, I do remember having some chew getting it to work with my other laptop but work it does (using the ArcSoft Software) I got a link from freecom for the Drivers and dowloaded them but have not been able to get it to work, I have a combination of BDA and WDM drivers and have got into a bit of a Pickle. How do I get this thing to work it seems that although the device is identifed by Windows XP the Total Media or Blaze DVT cannot see the device Any Help would be really appreciated as I am doing my OWN head in. I couldn't get the Freecom BDA drivers to work. (I cannot now remember which BDA driver I loaded and which MPEG codec - but I have the setup files saved) I use DV Scheduler (which uses VLC to stream the TS).
ALL FREEWARE I would like a program that supports the Freecom remote. My son has lost the original Freecom CD. I find Media Player Classic best at displaying recorded TS files.
DV scheduler can capture complete MUX streams - but I cannot select a channel from the 'Full' TS file - just play the one originally selected - does anyone know a media player that can? In the problems with IE8 and its effect on Opera and Firefox I managed to lose all my Bookmarks so cannot give you links (yet!) to the sites I used (I have backed off to IE7 and Opera 9.6).
Freecom Dvb Driver For Mac Pro
I'm running 32bit Ultimate edition. Are you sure you want to run 64bit? You'll have even more trouble finding drivers for all your hardware than you will for the 32bit version. I just tried the official Vista drivers. Interestingly, I first tried to update the drivers from device manager, pointing it to the new drivers, but Vista reported that the best driver (the XP one - 2.0.1.8) was already installed. I then uninstalled the driver, rebooted and then installed the official Vista one (3.0.1.18), which is working as expected. Vista did moan that it could not verify the driver, but installation was fine.
Freecom Dvb Driver For Mac Download
All working fine in Media Center. Didn't have to re-scan for services or anything like that.
EDIT: I just noticed that the XP driver reported that it is signed, under Vista, where as the Vista one is not - see pic in link above.