[djfiii]

Thanks for the tips, however I think I'm giving it up at this point. I've spent hours and hours trying to figure out why it's not working, looking for new drivers, uninstalling, reinstalling the OS, etc. I even thought that worst case scenario, I would be able to check the option for an external player (one that works fine outside of media player - MPC) and MP would basically become just a nice looking shell to navigate my files that would spawn a new executable for my player, but even that doesn't work (same error in the error log). I don't know what VRM9 is, although I found reference to it in the config and tried every combination of options with no luck.

At this point, I can point and click with my mouse and an AVI will autostart in Media Player Classic in full screen mode. That's going to have to be good enough until there has been more work with the 790GX chipset. Maybe MP v2 will work better for me

Note: I'm a web dev on the side and have enjoyed contributing to open source projects, so I'm not complaining too loudly that this seemingly awesome, free, project doesn't work for me yet. If I had the expertise and time, I'd probably kick in. In the mean time, I'll just report my troubles and wait for a new release.

[globaldonkey]

I really don't think MP is your problem, other than the fact that it is using VMR9 (this is the video renderer - the last thing that is done before the screen is sent to your display driver) instead of VMR. I think you have some sort of Direct-X / ATI driver problem.

Try switching MPC to VMR9 and see it works (View | Options | Playback | Output | VMR9 (Renderless)

Your logs clearly showed part of your ATI drivers not loading. Have you gone to gigabyte's website and downloaded and installed the latest BIOS / Chipset drivers? GIGABYTE - Support - Motherboard - Driver - GA-MA790GP-DS4H (rev. 1.0)

[djfiii]

Ok, I finally got it worked out. Thanks to globaldonkey for helping interperet the logs - narrowing it down to a driver issue is ultimately what led me to the fix. For anyone that runs into this in the future, here is what happened:

My XP Pro install disc is SP1. If you've read the requirements, you should be using SP3 (I think SP2 will work as well as long as you manually apply some other fixes that are included in SP3). In any event, the sequence of events on my first few attempts was:

1) Install the OS from disc (XP SP1)
2) Install the 790GX chipset drivers from the Gigabyte disc (all of them - video, NIC, audio, etc.)
3) Connect to inet, download and install all hotfixes and SP's for XP
4) Install codecs that I wanted (ffdshow, etc.)
5) Install MediaPortal

This was NOT working. Based on input from globaldonkey, I figured it was the video driver but even installing current drivers from gigabyte was not working in the sequence above. I thought I'd try the following as a last ditch effort:

1) Install the OS from disc (XP SP1)
2) Intall ONLY THE NIC driver from the gigabyte disc so I can connect to the inet and upgrade the OS to SP3 + all hotfixes BEFORE installing other chipset drivers.
3) Upgrade to SP3, all hotfixes, etc.
4) Install the remaining chipset drivers from the gigabyte disc (audio, video, ec).
5) Upgrade to current drivers from gigabyte website
6) Install codecs
7) Install Media Portal

This worked! I can only assume that installing the chipset drivers, and then updating them on an already existing build of XP SP3 (vs. installing the drivers on XP SP1, then updating XP to SP3) did something differently. In any event, if anyone with the 790GX chipset hits this problem on XP SP1, try updating to SP3 BEFORE installing your audit / video drivers.

Thanks globaldonkey for the help!

-David

[globaldonkey]

Glad to hear you got it worked out, and thanks for posting back with your solution.

I'd probably bypass step 4 and just install the new drivers (step 5), unless the driver packages are specifically upgrades only.

It should have been possible to uninstall and re-install the drivers on your existing system without resorting to rebuilding, but it can be difficult to get a clean uninstall sometimes.