systematic testing of codecs and options for smooth LiveTV

[rickolous]

Hi everyone,

Ive been trying to setup a MediaPortal system for a few weeks now. Unfortunatly i didnt quite do enough indepth research before i bought the parts and Ive ended up with an ITX board that isnt fully DX9 compatible, namely a Insight P4ITX with SIS ProSavageDDR integrated graphics.

Its a great little board but i think the wishywashy DX9 support is causing me problems trying to get a good watchable picture from the Hauppague 350 im using.

So, to try and bring some order to the faffing ive been doing for the last few weeks, ive decided the best thing to do is build a matrix, containing each codec and the MediaPortal options that have the biggest impact on the performance of LiveTV streams, and test each setting in turn so i can see what the 'big picture' is and which codec gets halfway there, and then i'll concentrate on fiddling with that specific codec and its particular excentricities to hopefully get it the rest of the way.

So, main reason for this thread is to ask you guys which Mediaportal options you have found to have the biggest immediate affect on LiveTV?

The three options on my matrix currently are:

Overlay or VM9,
Exclusive DirectX access when fullscreen on/off.
timeshift on/off

Im then giving each combination of settings a colour once tested ie

red = dont go there
blue = fair (stuttering picture etc)
green = smooth picture no jumping no ghosting

I'll try a quick example of the matrix

Codec______|__Mode___|___Window___|___Fullscreen__ |___Fullscreen (Exclusive DirectX)__|__Timeshift enabled__|

Mpeg2Dec___|_Overlay__|___blue______|_____blue____ _|_________blue_______________|________blue_______ |
Mpeg2Dec___|__VMR9___|___blue______|_____blue_____ |__________red_______________|________blue_______|

Dscaler_____|_Overlay__|___blue______|_____blue___ __|_________blue_______________|________blue______ _|
Dscaler_____|__VMR9___|___blue______|_____blue____ _|__________red_______________|_________red________|


So (if the above makes sense) you can use this to quickly and systematically work your way through whatever codecs you have on your system and hopefully find one or two which perform best on your system.

Obviously the results of this will be dependant on the specs of the computer being used, but maybe if we can flesh it out with some more detail (in terms of more generic MediaPortal options per codec) a blank template available for download would be a useful tool to point people towards when they come on here asking what codecs to use?

any comments? and what parameters should i add to the matrix?