good TV tuner/capture software (preferablly free)

[nonlinear]

i have video of a turbulent diffusion flame. it flickers, and there is variation in the height, but i want to digitize the video, then take height measurements at certain frame or time intervals, and use this to calculate a mean flame height. we have a tv tuner card on one of our desktops that has all the drivers installed, but not any tv tuner or capture software (i reformatted and never installed the SONY crap that was preloaded).

can anyone recommend a good (and preferably free and open) application for tuning the tv card, capturing, and doing the frame editing?

thanks

[UndrgroundRider]

VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) will work for that.

[nonlinear]

hrm, can't get that program to recognize my tv tuner.... can anyone recommend a good tv tuner, and then maybe i can just do screen captures?

[Grogador]

Try VLC, it can open/record capture devices (hopefully yours assuming the drivers are correct) ... otherwise try WinDVR (free trial) or check the bottom of this page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterVideo_WinDVR) for links to some other DVR packages.

[nonlinear]

got it to work great in videolan... it's still weird cause i'm not sure how or why the TV tuner is choosing channel 3, but as long as it works that's fine by me haha