Note: I am using this card in a cable network in Finland, so depending on your location and signal, YMMV.



Next I installed tvtime. It can't record programs (xawtv does that), but IMO it's the best application for just watching them.

When installing tvtime in Sid, dpkg asks some questions about the tuning, but the full scan, which is needed in a cable network isn't an option there (the european frequency set seemed to work, though). For that I ran tvtime's own tvtime-scanner as root. That gave me a working configuration in /root/.tvtime/stationlist.xml, from which I was able to tweak the channels into order and name them properly. In order to use this set of channels, the Custom channel set needs to be chosen from tvtime's Channel management menu → Change frequency table.

Starting tvtime once as a normal user creates the configuration directory (.tvtime) under the user's home directory. I copied my hand-tweaked stationlist.xml into /etc/tvtime/ (that's where tvtime's system-wide configuration is kept in Debian), and linked it back for my normal user account's use:

$ ln -s /etc/tvtime/stationlist.xml ~/.tvtime/stationlist.xml