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I’ll start with software called DVB Viewer. It was the first program in which video and audio could be recorded to the hard drive. Before it, there was nothing except the original Technisat (EON) TV4PC software. I think that right from the beginning it wasn’t free, and in the very first version you could record only 10 minutes, then the program shut down.

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On the left is a screenshot of the player, on the right is the channel list. I don’t use this player, so I won’t go into detail, but when I installed it and played with it a bit, I noticed that it has a quite decent EPG. Otherwise it is fairly clear and has many useful features. It would be different if it were free.

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The second DVB player is Watch TV Pro (demo). This player is developed for SS1 cards, but this version (and maybe future ones) is compatible with SS2 as well. It looks like a quite decent player, but the demo version doesn’t offer many features, so I didn’t test it. The demo version doesn’t support plugins and doesn’t record, so the only thing it offers is watching TV and listening to radio, like TV4PC.

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The next player is MilDVB. It does not require installation — just copy it into a directory and it is ready to use. I tried it a few times, but didn’t find anything interesting about it, so I’m attaching only a screenshot.

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I couldn’t get this software to run and I don’t know why. The readme says it requires at least 256 MB of RAM, and I have only 128 MB (probably that’s why it doesn’t work).

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And here we have another player (there are as many as mushrooms after rain). NassrDVB also looks quite decent, but I haven’t tested it yet.

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While getting familiar with this player, I noticed that in the recording settings you can choose: of course MPEG, but also PVA or TS (transport stream). It is a modest player, but I think it has potential (just my opinion).

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I installed (well, not installed — just unpacked into a directory) this player only recently. After opening the exe file I found out it is probably Greek software (or something else), so I didn’t bother with it. I didn’t test recording or decoding, but it should work without problems. I only tested channel scanning, which worked fine. I don’t know if there are other language versions, but it wouldn’t hurt.

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Although this software is intended for SS1 cards, in the readme file I found: "LowBudget-Cards: (Only tested by BetaTesters): SS2, Pinnacle PCTVSAT, NOVA, TT-DVBc-Budget and Twinhan 1020" meaning it is also for SS2 beta testing. However, neither sound nor picture worked for me. I registered the file DVBcore_Register.bat but couldn’t get it running. Scanning worked fine (signal was OK) and EPG worked too. Maybe I forgot something — I really don’t know.

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I don’t know why I put this player at the end — I think it’s not the worst, rather I would say that simplicity is its strength. It is clear, has the necessary functions, and mainly supports plugins, meaning it has almost everything. I remember using it some time ago, but that was long ago. At the moment I stay with DVBDream and SkyView.