I have a Pinnacle PCTV 100e external USB cable television receiver.

I've been using Pinnacle's software that came with the card (TVCenter Pro) to record things at given times. Things I don't like is an extremely high CPU load, and that it doesn't seem to halt the screensaver from running when watching in full screen.

Also, I was away the last two weeks, and the schedules went terribly bust. Some items were recorded hours before or after the actual scheduled time (and now I missed some shows), and some recurring schedules weren't converted into the next occurrence correctly!

Is there good alternative software that would work with my PCTV 100e? (Preferalby cheap or free)

I've tried VLC Player, which gets video, but no audio.

I've tried MediaPortal, which crashes when trying to scan for channels. When I select a channel manually, the stored mpg has big errors in encoding and is also missing audio. There's VirtualDub, but that doesn't have ready-made scheduled-recording options. This I can conjure some scheduled scripts for, but I've noticed the sync gets awfully wrong after some time.

I've tried Windows Media Center, but it doesn't seem to support the PCTV 100e.