The installation was a breeze, as far as hardware installs go. All told it took about half an hour to set up and get running; most of that time was spent goofing with video drivers before I remembered that I'm on Windows Server 2003 and the software wants Windows XP. (As a side note, thank you Microsoft for compatibility emulation. I owe you my soul many times over for that feature.) After that it took a few minutes to figure out why I wasn't getting any audio. Turns out my sound card drivers decided to forget that I told them to output over SPDIF to my surround sound decoder, so they were outputting standard stereo analog to... nothing.
As many users have commented out on the Great Intarwebnets, the software bundled with the card is pretty craptacular. It's not downright bad (I've used much worse in my time) but it is a little annoying. The channel change speed is fairly slow, but I'm not much of a channel-surfer anyways, so I don't really care.
Picture quality is superb, and easily outdoes the $15 VCR I had from WalMart. No complaints there, although the filtering algorithm does seem to do weird things to text.
Next quest is to figure out how to get it to record shows on a schedule, so I can get my Adult Swim fix without having to wait until the TV station deems it appropriate to air the shows. Silly TV stations. I'll probably go hunting for some better TV software for that, as the bundled package makes me want to kick someone's cat.
So... now I'm really going to bed. For real this time. But really I'm going to stalk your cat. Read my article. Generic subliminal message.
