Software Engineering at its best

Posted on:September 17 2005

I just bought an internal tv tuner for my pc. It works, but its software needs 300 MB on my harddisk, is slow as hell and needs half an hour to start up. So I wanted to find out why. In short: The 300 MB are there because it installs a .NET framework, an SQL server and not only the drivers for the tuner I bought, but it also for every other piece of hardware of this manufacturer. Lets waste some space, today's harddisks can handle this, ok. But it is getting better: It installs a whole SQL server and sets it up as always running service just for storing 4 small tables, which look like this:

Right, these are the TV channels. WTF! And the time needed to start up? I have the faint suspicion that it's just the time needed to connect to the local running server. Arggh. Ahyes, and don't even try to stop the SQL server manually. The program will hang up when starting. Error messages? Nope.

Comments:

You should have bought a TV.

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2005-09-17 16:53:00

I hope you return the tv tuner, that is unacceptable! >:-/

I think there were some external tuners at apple.com... get a Mini... ahem ahem.. :-D

Julio Gorg&eacut

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2005-09-17 17:16:00

Try this: http://www.kastortv.org/

kamex

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2005-09-17 18:40:00

DScaler is the best app for TV-tiners. I use it for about 5 years and still very happy.

puh

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2005-09-17 19:29:00

You know, when I saw this entry for the first time, I thought i was on "The Daily WTF" instead of your weblog...

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2005-09-17 22:53:00

Uff. That's unbelievable.

oli

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2005-09-18 02:32:00

i noticed my tv-tuner card is from the same manufacturer.... it works great
with xawtv on linux, you should give that a try :)

or you could yell at the manufacturer only to find out they control pretty much all of the market for this kind of products...

Armen138

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2005-09-18 05:13:00

An SQL server for that ? Like we say in French, it's a hammer for crushing a fly... For .NET, it seems that a lot of programs that should have nothing to do with it need this to install/work (example : the last RADEON drivers).

Hervé

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2005-09-18 13:30:00

Ah I know that company. I had some DVD-Burning software from them that came with my PC. This thing needed a few hundred megs of harddisk (just for lots of fancy images in the UI) and took about 4 hours just to convert a few minutes of video. This SQL server crap really belongs to dailywtf :)

john doe

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2005-09-19 11:30:00

DScaler is the only way to go.

Matt

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2005-09-19 17:17:00

cool, thanks for the K!TV-tip, I'm using it. And it seems to use DScaler internally.

niko

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2005-09-20 22:24:00