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

[Ramjet99]

Thanks Amphibem, There are a lot of choices for cards and I appreciate the input of someone who uses and can vouch for a particular model. So in your opinion the 3000 will:

a) work with analogue channels in mediaportal (for my Sky Digital)?
b) work with terrestial freeview (for future use)?

[amphibem]

Originally Posted by Ramjet99

Thanks Amphibem, There are a lot of choices for cards and I appreciate the input of someone who uses and can vouch for a particular model. So in your opinion the 3000 will:

a) work with analogue channels in mediaportal (for my Sky Digital)?
b) work with terrestial freeview (for future use)?

What mcraenz said still stands true, the 3000/4000 have no hardware encoding and hence are bad choices for analogue. What however is a good choice for analogue is the HVR2200 as it can do MPEG2 HW encoding and has an S-Video input for Sky.

My point is the HVR3000 should be a good complement to a HVR2200 as it gives you the ability to record another DVB-T mux while using one of the HVR2200 analogue tuners. This allows for simultaneous recording TV1, TV2, TV3, C4 and Prime; something I personally do a lot of. And by having an HVR rather than just a DVB-T tuner you can get any satellite-only channels (Freeview or otherwise) and use the Satellite EIT data for an easy, reliable guide. Not having a satellite dish this isn't my personal setup but plently of others on this and other forums use these cards and by consensus they generally seem good.

[eXDee]

Think i've got svhs working reliably now. Now how do i tell mediaportal sky is outputting a widescreen image?

[martyyn]

I bought my 4000 some time ago, before the 220 I believe because had that been around I certainly wouldnt have bothered with the 4000. Howevet this doesnt solve my problem.

Is there anyone out there using an HVR4000, on RC2 and having no trouble with dvb-t ?

Im going to have another go with it tomorrow but I would really like to know if its at least working for anyone else before I start !

[Phatbloke]

Just a random query, does anyone else get large volume differences between channels with AC3 and AAC ? I have MP set to use AC3 if available so TV1 and 3 use it but all the others don't and end up being way louder than the others.
Would there be anything about that could normalise the volume? I'm using the AC3 Filter codec and it has heaps of options, might have to play with that and see if it can be done.

[kiwijunglist]

Originally Posted by martyyn

Has anyone had any trouble with their dbv-t and RC2 ?

I moved to RC2 a week or two after it came out using dvb-s and its been great. This weekend I finally got onto the roof to put up the UHF aerial Ive had in my garage for 6 weeks thanks to the weather and whilst it tunes ok and I get a good quality signal when using the preview on tv-server I get sound but no picture. Strangley when viewing the dvb-s my amp is telling me that I have 5.1 but thats probably another issue.

When I check graphedit I can see the sound is all good, but there is no video filter, so I add coreavc and it tells me it cant find a compatible join between the two so I get nothing. When using MP I ge the box telling me it cant start timeshift and on occassion yesterday it crashed MP altogether.

I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H with the signal going into an HVR-4000 along with the dvb-s. A friend has an identical setup but not RC2 and his is working perfectly and another friend (without the same hardware) who tried RC2 this weekend who got the same as me.

Ive loaded AC3filter and used DirectShow Manager to handle the priorities with no luck....anyone have any ideas ?

If there was a generic problem I wouldve expected up roar by now which is why I was expecting it to be safe !

Hi,

I have a similar setup to you

GA-MA78GM-S2H / HVR2200 / XP SP2 / Mediaportal RC2

I use the PDVD8 Ultra 1830 Codec

If I use the ATI Display drivers from the gigabyte site (v8.457) then TV1,2,3 + HDDEMO are perfect with hardware accleration. But I get decoding errors with C4,TVNZ6+7. If I go on to disable hardware accleration i get perfect on all channels, but occasionally get jitters when the CPU hits 90-100%.

If I load the latest Catalsyt 8.7 Suite drivers then i my XP crashes

If I load ATI Catalyst 8.8Beta Suite drivers then i can decode all channels using hardware acceleration, however i get frequent video glitches making it useless for watching more than 5 minutes of tv.

In answer to your question - I do not find that Mediaportal RC2 behaves differently compared to RC1 with DVB-T. I find it is better for me.

Originally Posted by TommySharp

The crash only occurs when scanning for analogue channels.

I re-installed XP pro (sp3) yesterday and made sure I went through ALL the pre-requisites on the WIKI.

Same thing when I scan for analogue channels on my other hybrid card, make = Asustek Tiger.

Just looking to get Prime and Juice TV. :-)

I can scan analog just fine using XP & MP RC2

I have a fresh install of XP Pro SP2
HVR2200 Driver download from the UK website
Catalyst Drivers from gigabyte.com (v8.475)
Mediaportal RC2

If I click scan it takes ages and picks up about 350 odd channels, hence i just added Prime TV manually.
I myself wonder if SP3 is the problem, when i had SP3 the mediaportal install crashed, then when i got it installed the tvserver configuration program didn't like starting and crashed a few times. I didn't try for a long time though, because my realtek drivers for onboard audio (GA-MA78GM-S2H) refuse to install under SP3.

[GerryAttrick]

One more Kiwi to bring the numbers up...based on North Shore.

I'm not likely to be able to offer much advice as I am new to this subject and I'll probably be asking heaps of questions as I build up my own system (see specs on my Newbie announcement). I'm currently researching a decent PCI (as opposed to PCIe card) so that I can start building something up.

Sure I know its not the latest and greatest way to go but we all have to start somewhere and I'd rather do it this way than buy a ready made option.

Meanwhile I'll probably lurk & learn.

[mcraenz]

Welcome Gerry!

The FUJITSU 670 will make a great TV Server, but you're going to be watching Freeview HD (DVB-T) It's likley to be problematic since you don't have a PCIe graphics card i.e no Hardware acceleration on the HD streams.

[TommySharp]

Is anyone using the MCE Buddy tool to compress .ts recordings?

I used to use it with Vista MC and it was great. However now it keeps failing with some "Mencoder" error.

I used to just convert analogue recordings in Vista MC so wondering if it's struggling with the digitial recordings..... Keen to hear if anyone else is using it with some sucess?

[Ramjet99]

HVR 2200 on its way, thanks for the good advice guys!