HTPC Project Progress Report

[dman_lfc]

Set Default Zoom Mode: to Normal as well.

DMAN

Results of this morning test using the settings from CoolHammer and dman_lfc:

1. Initially MP shutdown by itself the instant the DVD was recognized in the drive
2. Restarted MP and the DVD played OK to about 05:00 until I hit "B" to stop playing at which point MP shutdown by itself
3. Restarted MP with the DVD already in the drive. Play DVD asked if I wanted to Resume from 05:43 --- replied YES but the DVD started from zero.
4. Hit "B" to stop the DVD and MP froze up. Required Taskman shutdown of MP.

Further results from a morning of frustrations with the DVD ...

1. No matter what PC screen resolution I set (640x480, 720x480, 1024,768) the DVD starts cropped at the bottom as if the bottom 25-50 lines or so are missing.

This happens using EITHER the internal DVD player or the Cyberlink player configured within MP. No setting of the "Default Zoom Mode" or changes using the "s" key during DVD playing makes any difference, the bottom part of the image is still missing.

This does NOT happen if I use Cyberlink by itself from XP regardless of the resolution on the screen.

2. If MP is closed while a DVD is playing, MP and/or XP freezes requiring Task Manager to close the task. Of course the Taskbar is not restored in this case.

3. In several tests hitting "B" to stop the DVD resulted in a black screen and it did not return to MP. No user action restored MP and it required Task Manager to close it.

ffdPostProcessing is OFF in all cases
Video Renderer set to Overlay in all cases
All codecs and navigator set to Cyberlink in all cases
Subtitles OFF in all cases
Pixel Ratio Correction OFF in all cases

Well, another update...

I removed and reinstalled MP from scratch. The only things I saved and moved to the fresh install were the tvguide.xml, the channel logos and the tvdatabase so I didn't have to configure 156 channels again by hand.

So, I ran the Configuration program and started MP. That's when I found out the the Config program didn't save any of my settings! So I quit MP and reran the config and sure enough the all the settings I had put in were missing. So I put them in again and this time they appear to have 'stuck'.

DVD Playing
--------------
I configured MP to use the CyberLink codecs and external player. I started MP and did some more DVD testing with the following results:

1. the DVD image still cuts off the bottom 25-50 lines of the display. As before this does NOT happen when the DVD is played through CyberLink outside of MP so it appears to be related to MP. Its as if the player is sizing the image to a display buffer allocated for PAL and then outputting it to an NTSC display space.

2. if I stop the DVD before the end and come back an play it MP asks if I want to resume from MMS. If I say YES, it starts back at 0 anyway, it never resumes in process.

3. if I hit "Y" to display the OSD and even 'jiggle' the mouse the OSD clears. In normal operation this is probably not a problem as most people probably wouldn't run it from a keyboard/mouse anyway.

4. the OSD 'flashes' every time the runtime clock 'underneath' the OSD changes once per second --- really irritating.

5. on one occasion, hitting "B" to stop the DVD resulted in MP closing and going away immediately.

TV Operation
---------------
6. I did some testing with the TV as well. I have the PVR150MCE cards installed but no cable/antenna connected. When I selected a program to play I initially got a big black square about 3/4 the size of the screen and then that was overlayed with the display windo filled with colored 'hash'. MP froze up at that point and required TaskMan to shut it down.

Hopefully this is simply an anomoly due to the fact that I have no actual video source at this time and the card configuration may not be correct as a result.

Remote Control
------------------
On a more successful note I have installed Pacific Neo-Tek's "OmniRemote" software (http://www.pacificneotek.com) on an old Visor Prism I had and started building a custom remote control designed around the way MP is operated. So far it looks pretty nice. I trained it and MP with several remotes I had on hand and and actually controls MP pretty much as intended. More on this as it progresses.

Just FYI, the previous posting from "Guest" was mine. For some reason the forum did not log me in properly.

[CoolHammer]

2. if I stop the DVD before the end and come back an play it MP asks if I want to resume from MMS. If I say YES, it starts back at 0 anyway, it never resumes in process.

I don't think it even should work with external player.

I'm using internal player with 0.1.0.3 and when using cyberlink codecs and navigator it works like a charm now.

CoolHammer

I guess I'll try that combination then: Cyberlink codecs and the internal player.

Thanks

CoolHammer

FYI, I changed to the internal player and tried it again --- same result, starts from 0:00 every time.

Originally Posted by jsteele

When I selected a program to play I initially got a big black square about 3/4 the size of the screen and then that was overlayed with the display windo filled with colored 'hash'. MP froze up at that point and required TaskMan to shut it down.

I had TV working great. I made no changes and then the day after Christmas, I got the exact problem described above. Also at about the same time XMLTV stopped working. I upgraded to 0.1.0.3 last night and I still have the exact same problem.

To make matters worse, I upgraded from PowerDVD 6 Standard to WinDVD 6 Platinum a few days before my upgrade. I am now having a similiar DVD (but not exactly the same) problem.

It is just a little frustrating that when I think I have things working perfectly, everything seems to break. I'm tempted to uninstall everything and start over. I never could get DTS to work but thankfully I've conculded that is not an MP problem. I think after I go to CES this weekend and look at all the new to be released HT and HTPC products, I'll come home and try to work through all my issues.

Cheers!

After a long hiatus for some hardware problems and my work interfering in my fun, I have resumed working on my HTPC project. My motherboard died on me and I had to replace it so I took the opportunity to go for a faster CPU/memory and I'm now up to an ASUS A7V880 MB with a Athlon XP 3000.

Anyway after replacing everything and reinstalling XP (a whole other story) I installed MP 0.1.0.6 and it upgraded itself to 0.1.0.7 as designed. I installed the latest Hauppauge drivers from SHSPVR and the trial version of winDVD for the codecs.

I copied over my earlier XMLTV setup and made sure that worked. I also copied over the earlier tvdatabase12.db. I adjusted the external channels from 1001/1002 to 10001/10002. I then fired up MP and it worked --- it worked just fine and all of my earlier problems are gone. The 'stuttering video' is gone, the problems with the VRM9 operation, etc., all gone.

However, my TV Guide does not import into MP for some reason. Because I need to merge cable and satellite channels I had to create a batch that downloads the two channel lineups and then merges them together into a composite 'tvguide.xml'. This worked fine in MP 0.1.0.4 but for some reason I'm not getting the data into MP. Has MP's data format requirement changed?