WinTV? I don't think so.

I've spent the week playing around with WinTV. There's a lot to recommend this software, being free is high on the list. The interface looks nice and it has the necessary functionality. WinPC does not have a lot of bells and whistles, but it gets the job done. I'm reminded when I worked at Texas Instruments, we had a saying, "Minimum but adequate." There's a reason why TI is not a big name in computing. They never aimed very high. (Well, except for their attempt to create one of the first PC clones. It was a valiant effort, but the subject for another blog.)

The WinTV 7 viewer has an updated interface. (The helpfiles shows the rather outdated looking version 6 user interface still.) The viewer has a lot of buttons merely labeled with icons, and what most of them do are pretty obvious, but a few are not, and when you hover over them, a tool tip is not displayed that tells you the button's function. So, you have to press a button to find out. (Steve tells me that a gear is pretty common for a configuration icon, but I had no idea what it did.) When I clicked on the ? button on the menu bar and then clicked on the buttons, WinTV tried to bring up online web page, but since my network is not working, this was not helpful.

One thing that I don't like about the viewer is that it doesn't have a fast forward button. When you press what looks like a fast forward, it merely skips ahead, potentially landing you in the program after it has returned. I've started merely fast forwarding through commercials, rather than skipping. If I see one that interests me, I'll stop and watch it. (Hey, these folks paid to create these programs, the least we can do it watch their commercials. Of course, if it's for a product that I'll never use or a commercial that I've seen before, then it's on to the show!)

I also had problems with the scheduler software. When you schedule a recording, the time is entered in 24 hour time. When the schedule is displayed, the time is in 12 hour. Personally, since the time in the TV listings is in 12 hour format, I'd prefer to enter in the scheduler in 12 hour time. There is also a pair of up-down buttons next to the time. If you press them, they will increment or decrement the hour or minutes by one, depending on which is currently selected. It would be nice, when the minutes are selected and they are decremented past the start of the hour, if the hour would decrement too. If I'm trying to schedule a program whose scheduled time is listed in 12 hour eastern time, I have to convert to 24 hour time central and then subtract one from the hour because I want the recording to begin a minute early. It's just too easy to make a mistake when you're in a hurry. I'd like to just enter the time and press the down arrow to back up the time a few minutes. (Sure, I could use a calculator to compute the start time, but it seems ridiculous when there's a 64-bit microprocessor sitting there that can do it too.)

This is not my only issue with the scheduler. I messed up the start time on one of my programs and when I noticed that it wasn't recording when I expected it to, I looked at the scheduler, noticed my mistake and corrected the program. This created a program that spanned the current time. Now my old DVR would have started recording immediately, but WinTV didn't. I'm not holding that against it, but 45 minutes later, when the recording was originally scheduled to run, WinTV cranked up and began recording. Sigh.

All of this I could live with and eventually learn to deal with, but the program has crashed a few times. A dialog can be brought up where the discovered channels are can be edited, such as changing the title. There is also a check box that you can uncheck and cause the channel not to appear in the channel list. After you uncheck this check box, if you try to change the channel information, you'll get a message box saying that an error has occurred with the application. You can click a button to ignore the error and the program will continue as if nothing happened, but the crash is still pretty unprofessional. I have also had the TV Viewer outright crash while watching a live program. This required me to get up, cross the room to use the keyboard to clear the error and get the program back.

At this point, I knew that I couldn't use WinTV. If it was the only game in town, I'd keep working with the WinTV guys to help them fix their software, but at this point I think that I'll just report the problems and move on to another piece of software.