ATSC Card Owners: Come here for Support (4 Viewers)

[Slack]

Although you already convinced me a while back to go with VBOX. Thanks for that warning yet again.

Um, so stupid question. I see the Fusion5 Lite is STILL listed as supported. How is that possible? In light of all the threads on this family of cards and all the trouble?? Just curious.

It's taking me quite a while to get my HTPC together (budget etc..) but all this lurking pays big dividends.

SO I've been testing a little bit with a Fusion 5 Lite. At this point, I am very discouraged. The Fusion drivers are utter, utter crap. They crash SageTV, they crash MP, they crash my entire HTPC.

I've uninstalled it from my HTPC, and as soon as I get the time, I'm going to remove the card and put it in my testing rig for more exhaustive testing, but all I can say at this time is: I am not happy at all with my Fusion 5 Lite. Terrible. Just terrible.

FWIW, I ordered a 2nd Vbox DTA 150 for my living room HTPC. There is no way in hell I am putting a Fusion anything in my main HTPC ever again.

 

[Commodore 64]

I agree. I think it's time to update the TV card support list. I can't seem to find anyone who is able to use a Fusion 5 at this time with Media Portal.

Fusion cards seem to be excellent when used with the included DVICO software, but there seem to be many issues with them in programs like Sage and MP. I think it is related to the fact that they tune a lot of different formats (QAM, NTSC, and ATSC).

I know of at least one person using an ATi HD card and myself with the Vbox cards.

I hope to be able to test the Fusion 5 and the a180 more exhaustively in the coming months.

 

[aiwnow]

I'd say take the 10 GB/s memory requirement with a grain of salt. That MS article is not exactly technically oriented. 1080i is 1920 * 540 * 60 * 3 ~= 186 MB/s if it's uncompressed RGB. If it's packed YUV it's even less. 10 GB/s is more than 53 times that.

What renderer does the ATI MMC use? It requires DX9 cards to show 1080i content. As far as I know WatchHDTV uses VMR7. MMC showed a blank screen for 1080i channels from my HDTV Wonder on a AIW 7500. WatchHDTV worked fine. Now that I upgraded to a Radeon 9600 non-pro, both show 1080i channels.

I'm really hoping 0.2 final will work for me. All I want is the digital reception to work. My analog reception is poor so I don't even have it hooked up. MMC has a lot of issues and WatchHDTV is not well suited for a HTPC.

 

[Tech Geek]

Lower end cards have pleanty of bandwidth for HDTV. That isn't the problem. It's the way Microsoft's recording engine works and VMR9 that are the problem. Their software is very prone to dropping frames and stuttering.

There are all sorts of inefficient ways of dealing with the video that could result in taking 4 or more times the memory bandwidth that WatchHDTV requires.

If they are buffering decoded video they have to send the video stream to the card for decoding and recieve the decoded video back. On top of that a card has to have the memory bandwidth to scale and deinterlace the image. Add some inefficient code and the card suddenly has to do all that in a very short period of time. It's not the continous bandwidth that is the issue, it's the peak bandwidth.

I have no doubts that Microsoft could cut that number by 1/3 without much work at all. But they would rather spend a lot of time on DRM and other things that consumers don't want because it makes them money and gives them control.

 

[aiwnow]

I could believe that up 10x the bandwidth is required. But more than 53x?!? That takes some work. Also the bandwidth of AGP 8x is 2.1 GB/s (4x is 1.06 GB/s, etc.) This means any transfers to / from the card must be less than 2.1 GB/s.
I'm also suspicious that playback of recorded HDTV would require a different amount of bandwidth than live or timeshifted HDTV. Why would the video card care where the bits come from? In the case of timeshifted playback the bits are even coming from the same place (disk)!

Anyway, it would be interesting to know what renderer MMC uses. I feel like it's VMR9 since it requires DX9 and the easy look interface is nicely compositted in. If so, that's evidence that 1080i is possible on cards with less than 10 GB/s memory bandwidth and VMR9.

Also, as far as I know, MMC, WatchHDTV, and Win XP MCE all use the same buffering engine, the Microsoft Stream Buffer Engine. MMC might use it differently because it doesn't make DVR-MS files but if you look at it's timeshifting files they are labeled SBE.
And, the question we care about is whether Media Portal can do 1080i on our hardware. Hopefully, team media portal writes better code than MS.

 

[Commodore 64]

For ATSC, The last stable CVS is mediaportal-cvs-02-05-2006--15-17.rar.

I've got Timeshifting, TV Guide, Scheduled recordings, LiveTV, and recorded TV all working great with the Vbox-DTA-150.

 

[Commodore 64]

Fusion 5 LIte Works with February 5 CVS

OK folks. I'm currently using a Fusion 5 Lite to watch, record, and timeshift OTA ATSC TV.

Many thanks to Dman for the instructions:

1. Install the latest DVICO software (3.30.01) from their website: http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/ENG/Download/?act=LA

2. DO not install the drivers. When it prompts you to install the drivers, choose "Install later". You will be prompted to restart, but don't.

3. After the software install, go into Crogram FIles\Dvico directory and grab the "drivers" folder and move it somewhere safe.

4. Uninstall the Dvico software.

5. Reboot

6. WIndows will see your hardware and prompt you for drivers. Point it to the location where you stored your "drivers folder" and let it automatically install the drivers. You'll have to do this 3 or 4 times to get everything installed.


That's it. Fire up MP and autotune and you should be good to go.

Note that newer CVS versions do not support ATSC at the moment, but it is being worked on. So for now use RC2 and the 02-05-2006 CVS build.

 

[Legend]

...snip...

4. Uninstall the Dvico software.

...snip...

Man, this just doesn't make sense. I've done driver development myself and there is no reason why you should have to do it this way.

1. Installing and uninstalling the whole software just to get the driver files is silly. Most zip-capable programs (I used 7zip) will extract the files from the installer and then you can just grab the Drivers directory from it and save a couple of reboots. Assuming the application wasn't installed before already you can just proceed with the drivers then. If anyone has problems extracting the drivers, I can zip them up and make them available as a single smaller package.

2. The only reason I could imagine why uninstalling the application might make a difference, is because of the other programs DViCO installs and which run on autostart, such as the Recording scheduler and the remote tray application. It should be possible to close and unload those programs without uninstalling the application.

I'm saying this obviously because I don't want to uninstall the DViCO application, especially while MP is not perfectly stable with ATSC.

C64, question for you: For your Fusion 5 Lite, how many devices do you see in your device manager? I have the USB Version of the FusionHDTV5, therefore I only see one single device in device manager (which means suggestions to disable wdm tuner and crossbar in device manager didn't work for me, because I couldn't do that).

That being said, for testing purposes I am willing to uninstall the software and see if it actually helps, but once again I want to make clear what my MP does: Autotune DOES work, my problem is that it only seems to tune into analog channels and it doesn't do ATSC for me. Is that the problem you had, C64?

Legend

 

[crickert]

C64, question for you: For your Fusion 5 Lite, how many devices do you see in your device manager? I have the USB Version of the FusionHDTV5, therefore I only see one single device in device manager (which means suggestions to disable wdm tuner and crossbar in device manager didn't work for me, because I couldn't do that).

That being said, for testing purposes I am willing to uninstall the software and see if it actually helps, but once again I want to make clear what my MP does: Autotune DOES work, my problem is that it only seems to tune into analog channels and it doesn't do ATSC for me. Is that the problem you had, C64?

Legend,

I've got the USB version also. Same problem as you - can't autotune ATSC - only analog. I might give C64's method a try. I agree it doesn't make sense.

 

[Commodore 64]

In the Device Manger I have 5 Fusion entries.

I have disabled NONE of them.

When I go to add a card in MP , the only Fusion card I can add is "Fusion HDTV Transport Stream (Fusion HDTV5 Lite)".

If you aren't able to see that option or add that card, then I'm thinking that your BDA drivers are somehow not referenced properly in the Capturecarddefinitions.xml file.

ALso, the test team NEEDS another ATSC tester or two. CAn you guys help? Are you interested in helping?