The drama of trying to watch digital TV

Here in Oz we once again have a 3-way one-day cricket tournament. Channel 9 have the rights to broadcast it free-to-air, but the matches which don't have Australia in them seem to be broadcast on one of the channel 9 digital channels.

This is a problem for us as we don't yet have a digital TV nor a set-top box to watch these channels - they are only being mandatory here in December 2013 (most of 2 years away yet) so we haven't bothered.

What we do have is a TV tuner card in one computer (but like our TV it is only analogue and therefore can't get the digital channels) and we have a USB digital TV tuner stick. I thought, "Great! Just plug that in and away we go!"

Not so :-(

I plugged it into my laptop running Win7 expecting it to simply try to download the driver and install and then I could use a program to access it - it is USB after all! Instead, Windows told me it knew nothing about the driver... so I went and downloaded it (not being able to find the install disk). I went to run the driver install program, and Windows told me that I needed to actually log in as the administrator (not just use admin privileges) in order to install hardware! So I did, and guess what? Windows failed to install it... because when I'd set my computer up I'd left the admin password blank (I'm the only one using this computer and quite frankly I couldn't be bothered with yet another password) - and Windows told me that it would not install stuff if the admin password is blank. Grrrr.

So, now I'm currently downloading a CD image for a program that will let me set the administrator password, so I can install the driver, so I can watch TV...

In the meantime, while that was downloading (it's currently up to 40% and taken 2 hours to get that far :-( ) I decided to try it out on my old WinXP machine which would just barely keep up the frame rate - not an issue since at least I'd be watching something. Sure enough, installed the driver, installed the software, and up and running within about 10 minutes. With one exception.

I still can't watch the cricket. The receiver I'm using is at the other end of the house to the TV antenna point (which is actually unusable as it is an old type of socket and I haven't got onto our landlord yet to get it changed over!) so I hooked up a "rabbit's ears" antenna - only to find that the receiver can only find ABC and SBS digital channels since the commercial channels (including 9) are too stingy to use high-powered transmitters for their digital signals... and only a roof-mounted antenna has sufficient gain to extract the digital signal properly.

Sigh.

At least there's still cricinfo.com.au's live scorecard, so long as our Internet connection doesn't go down...

Edit (24 Feb 2012): today we bought a cheap HD set top box with PVR function via external USB hard disk, and set it up to see if it would work off the rabbit's ears antenna... and it did, so now I'm watching the current cricket match on HD through it and it is sensational!