Calling all MP New Zealanders (Both of you!!)

[Bleazle]

Love the drawing - she's hard work drawing with a mouse! Yep, that's how it's set up - and the EPG is set up correctly (I've always had the Prime feed coming from the Sky feed so I know that works).

Since my last post I did ANOTHER restart, then low and behold Prime worked great in MP - ONCE! then I checked out another channel, came back to Prime and it was stuttery and basically crap - definitely unwatchable. I decided to try recording Prime to see what would happen - answer - nothing, just a black screen (which often happened when I was using the analogue aerial feed). So I tried viewing Prime from the EPG again and once again got the "No Video/Audio Detected" message again

The drivers for the PVR150 are old - they're the "March" drivers (from around 2005 if I recall correctly) which worked with the Hauppauge Tweak tool - maybe I should just update the drivers and forget about the tweak tool? Still seems strange to me that MP keeps "loosing" the PVR 150 when MCE never did...

What do you reckon?

[mcraenz]

Hmmmm, well you've got everything setup correctly, so defiantly not user error! But yeah I would defiantly update the drivers and have a play with the new analog quality control settings in TVServer config.

[Bleazle]

It's almost sorted...

Updating the drivers was definitely the way to go - I haven't had the "no Audio/Video" message since doing that and Prime is playing in MP without a hitch at the moment. The only problem I have is that recording is a bit iffy - sometimes it records and other times all I get is a black screen - any ideas on what causes that?

David

[mcraenz]

any ideas on what causes that?

No and it's strange because I've found my PVR150 to be the most stable card in my whole system, put it in and forget about it :?

[RedeviL]

My lord, this threads still going! O_O

Bleazle, does it record audio and a black screen?
Or just nothing?

[Bleazle]

@ RedeviL: Black screen - no sound or pic.

The good news is that I think it might be sorted (don't want to be overly confident yet!) I hadn't noticed that for some reason the PVR150 was set to record and timeshift to different folders than the SS2 cards (both folders for the PVR150 were in the MediaPortal folder under "programmes") so I set them to the same folders as the SS2 cards (2 different HDDs - one for TV recording and one for Timeshifting) and I've recorded 6 programmes since 8pm last night that have been perfect! yeah!

@ mcraenz: thanks for your help on this - one thing though - in the NZWiki regarding combining channels (wanted to double check I had set everything right there so went through the instructions) it says "In the right listview double click "Prime"; you will see that it changes to "(EPG Only)" - nothing happens when I double click on Prime though I only have one analogue card so could that be why? Not a biggie because it all seems to be working now so I was just wondering..

So if the Prime thing is sorted maybe I should subscribe to Sky and the learn about that IR Blaster thingy I keep reading about...

Spoke too soon have just "recorded" an hour of black screen and silence again Any ideas anyone?

[payload]

Hello fellow NZ MP users. I am a long time MP user but I haven't been overly active on the forums. I was hoping to get some advice regarding connecting to the Freeview Terrestrial service. My current setup is a backend server with 2 Hauppauge PVR-150 cards. This is a pretty old PC, a P4 1.6. I have 2 front-ends. which are elderly 1.1 GHz Celeron laptops. These are connected to a SD TV and my Infocus projector which is also only SD. Despite the age of the hardware, its all working pretty well. I am now looking longingly at Freeview, with it's Picture Quality, Wide Screen and Digital Sound malarky. But I do have some doubts and questions.

1. What card? The Hauppauge Nova T 500 looks like a good start. Seems pretty cheap and has dual tuners, but is there a catch?
2. Codecs? This has got me really confused. Freeview broadcasts in MPEG4, but the cards all have MPEG2 encoders. Will the card convert the MPEG4 data into MPEG2 in realtime or does it need to be done by the PCs CPU? This could be my biggest issue I suspect.
3. HD or SD? I will admit that my current hardware won't handle HD, but can the tuner card be configured to encode in SD? I don't really need HD yet and probably not for a while.

Any input would be appreciated.

Justin

[RedeviL]

payload, my first question would be - is Freeview HD (Terrestrial) right for you?

You could easily go for the Freeview Satellite route which would tick all the boxes for Picture Quality, Wide Screen and Digital Sound. It's also in only MPEG2 - which your hardware would be able to handle as you stated.

Since Terrestrial is transmitted in MPEG4 which is HD - the receiving hardware must downscale this for SD.
This still requires a LOT of system processing and work.
Even playing HD back in it's original format takes a lot of processing work.

I had to upgrade my AMD XP2000+ to the system detailed under My System to the left because it couldn't handle HD.

[mcraenz]

Hey payload, the card won't do any encoding or decoding. The MPEG4 decoding needs to be done either with CPU in software (not ideal) or with a graphics card which supports MPEG4 h.264 hardware decoding. But to be honest you're really going to be looking at a complete architecture update. i.e. PCIe in which case I would recommend a Hauppauge WINTV PVR-2200 dual tuner.

[RedeviL]

Originally Posted by Bleazle

Spoke too soon have just "recorded" an hour of black screen and silence again Any ideas anyone?

Have you checked the logs to see if theres any pointers as to whats causing this?
It seems as if the cards being told to record the feed - but it's failing but not producing an obvious error.