CD or not CD?

[Pilgrim]

I came across something the other day that I have never heard of before (which is not hard) and I thought I would post it on here to see if anyone had any ideas.

I was looking at a digital USB TV tuner, if you buy one you get an installation CD along with various other things in the package.
As is often the way with such things by the time they have been through the supply chain and reached the consumer the software has been updated and you need to download the latest version from the manufacturers website.
All my past experience of such things is that you run the version you have downloaded and away you go, not in this case.
It appears that to install the downloaded software or to later update it requires the original CD to be available. OK I thought but, what happens if you have a portable computer without a CD drive? (Yes I am aware of external drives but not everybody would have one.)
According to the manufacturer the answer to that is to phone their technical department and some sort of authorisation takes place although I do not know the details.

My first thought was that you could copy the files from the CD and transfer them to the portable's hard drive before you tried installing the newer version but from what I read this does not work. Which leads me to something I have no experience of. I wondered if it would be possible to mount the CD virtually in some way that would do the same job? If so what (free) software is available that would do it?

My final question relates to what is actually at the bottom of this. The installation is almost certainly getting information from the CD and yet apparently if those same files are moved to a hard drive it cannot pick it up, why?

Anyone got any thoughts or any possible alternatives on how to do this without having to contact the manufacturer each time?

[hal9000]

Just try using Imgburn or just about any other free burning software and create an iso from the cd. If there's any copy protection, you might have to play with the settings a bit to get it copied successfully. After you have the iso, use Daemon Tools to mount the image and try it from there.

Out of interest, what is the tuner and software which does this??

[Pilgrim]

hal9000,

The tuners are made by Hauppage and as far as I am aware it applies to all USB versions, possibly their PCI cards as well but I am not certain of that.

The software is WinTV 7, the device drivers themselves appear to load without any need of authorisation.

I gather that you can use these tuners with other software which would avoid the issue but there it gets confusing as some programs are twice the size of others with no indication as to why and it seems that there are a lot of very different views as to which is best, in some cases people recommend one program for analogue and another for digital which seems ridiculous to me as those that I looked at some time back all seemed to do both.

Thanks for the information about creating an ISO, I wondered if that might work but I have never needed to try it before. I have CDBurnerXP which will create one and although I have no idea what I have that does it, if I double click on an ISO image it gets mounted.

[hal9000]

I just had a quick look around about these Hauppage tuners and this CD issue is a right mess!! There's loads of people having various problems. According to Hauppage themselves, they have to pay royalties for some stuff on every WinTV 7 CD they distribute which is why it's protected. This is more like a game install CD than a driver CD!!

If you haven't been there, THIS site looks quite interesting and could be of some help.

There's plenty of software which will mount an ISO as a drive such as some burning software, iso creation software like ultraISO, dedicated software like Daemon Tools, and loads of other stuff.

[Pilgrim]

I've not got the time to go into all the details at the moment but I cannot make up my mind if these are very good or the exact opposite.

If you haven't been there, THIS site looks quite interesting and could be of some help.

If I search HVR900 on that site all it turns up is someone missing a codec?

The good: Using their tiny little aerial and a booster both my computers picked up all 29 channels from our local (relay) transmitter without any problems. No sound or vision problems either regardless of using a small window or full screen. My PC will pick them up without a booster but the quality is not as good.

The bad: My main TV setup comes down to 3 analogue channels on a single cable: CH21 Freesat, CH28 Freeview, CH35 VCR. The only one that I can pick up on the computers is the first provided the other 2 are disconnected. Trying to run either of the others on their own does not work nor does entering the channel details manually.

It seems my first job is to find some decent software for the analogue signal as the problem seems to be there rather than with the tuner.

[maniac2003]

If you don't want to mess with Daemon Tools, I read more and more bad experiences lately, try DVDFab Virtual Drive. Free and without Ads.