TV tuner cards allow a desktop PC to receive and display broadcasted television signals. TUNER provides an example of how to use the MCI string interface to control a tuner card.
Note: A TV tuner card (such as the WinTV Basic) is required to run the TUNER sample.
Once the application is running, the display window can be sized and a TV channel can be selected. The channel can be selected through up/down buttons or a text entry field displayed both at the bottom of the window.
A TV tuner card is handled as a digital video device by the multimedia subsystem. A typical system has one or more digital video devices, with digitalvideo01 assigned to software motion video. By default this sample opens the digitalvideo02 device. If the tuner card is not assigned to digitalvideo02 an alternate device ordinal must be provided at the command line with the format:
/d=digitalvideoxx
where xx is a two digit number, padded on the left with zero.
For example:
/d=digitalvideo03
Most TV tuner cards, such as the Hauppauge WinTV card, support several video sources. The connector number that corresponds to the tuner video source is dependent on the hardware and may not be the same for each tuner card. The connector number is not changed by this sample. Instead, it uses the default connector number set in the Multimedia Setup application.