I was hunting around feverishly for a decent online television channel to use for the inauguration yesterday (Joost stuttered like crazy over here, and the BBC talk way too much) and I stumbled across ProgDVB. It’s a freeware TV watching program which gives you a huge set of global radio and TV channels to choose from, as well as cool PVR timeshift recording and a general recording feature for terrestrial and satellite broadcasts.

I couldn’t record Internet TV for some reason (although the timeshift pause works fine), and I’m not sure if that’s by design or a bug. Nevertheless the program works well, supports HD and has an equalizer for the sound, although the end result depends very much on the channel bandwidth you’re getting of course. In the end I watched a great feed from C-Span with no banal chatter just excellent quality footage. A shoutout to Reddit for pointing me in the right direction.