Calling all MP New Zealanders (Both of you!!) (6 Viewers)

[martyyn]

Well I think I finally have it working. For the life of me I couldnt get SAF5.0 or the unlocked version to work at all. So I went back to a fresh image and did what Ive always used being coreavc, acfilter and ffdshow on their own. Hey presto it all seems to be ok now.

I can play mkv's, all tv channels and SBS. The only thing is when I scan on the dvb-t I only get tv1, 2, 3, 6, 7, C4 and C42 but none of the 'fringe' channels. It was a beautiful evening yesterday so I know its not a problem with the signal !

The only other problem Ive had is when I connected up the front fan on my case. The TV server had the stability of a blamange. It wouldnt start, wouldnt show any previews and wouldnt restart. Anything I tried to do resulted in a crash. The moment I disconnect the fan and its all ok again.

Im still seriously considering moving to W7 and trying MCE and I suppose Im only another 'unknown' problem away from that. Ive done my bit of trawling through the forums, search the web, trying different codecs over the years Ive been using MP and I just want something that works now. So dont hate me if I do !

 

[Bleazle]

...Im still seriously considering moving to W7 and trying MCE and I suppose Im only another 'unknown' problem away from that. Ive done my bit of trawling through the forums, search the web, trying different codecs over the years Ive been using MP and I just want something that works now. So dont hate me if I do !

I had a look at MCE when I built my new HTPC with W7. W7 is great but 5 minutes of MCE was enough to tell me it wasn't what I wanted, but each to their own. I hear what you're saying with regards to codec issues etc and in a perfect world MP would be a "plug and play" solution but it's not and I've come to accept that MP is for people who want to be able to tinker and tweak to get what they're looking for and I guess I must be one of those people because that's how I ended up skinning

I'm looking forward to checking out the "coverflow" view in MP 1.2, plus it sounds like the skin engine has been improved so it should be a good "stop gap" between MP 1.XXXX and the long awaited MP2

Quick question: Is anyone here using ForTheRecord's Argus TV Server? I want to give it a crack but I'm stuck on what to do with regard to the satellite settings (Optus D1 for DVB-S) so any help there would be appreciated.

Cheers

Bleazle

 

[johns11]

Does anyone have experience with 785g or 880g onboard graphics?

I'm looking for 2 new motherboards for MP server/client and an MP client. The Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H has everything I need and includes onboard (880g) ATI HD 4250. I'm just a little nervous about how this will go rendering 1080i h.264 with hardware accelleration (DXVA). Any experience with the 785g or 880g would be appreciated.

thanks

 

[kiwijunglist]

Does anyone have experience with 785g or 880g onboard graphics?

I'm looking for 2 new motherboards for MP server/client and an MP client. The Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H has everything I need and includes onboard (880g) ATI HD 4250. I'm just a little nervous about how this will go rendering 1080i h.264 with hardware accelleration (DXVA). Any experience with the 785g or 880g would be appreciated.

thanks

785g onboard is too slow/borderline for 1080i, it will drop frames and loose sync when using the mediaportal renderer, it may do 1080i in other programs, but it wont work nicely for mediaprotal.
880g (4250) maybe ok, but might not be, if I was you I would mildy nervous
also remember the presence/absence of sideport memory makes a difference as sideport memory can be accessed faster than shared ram. shared ram also causes a bottle neck, and I know with 780/785g if you have an HT2 cpu it slows down the video card, so you need an HT3 cpu for it to function well.

so if you had 880g with sideport + ht3 u might be ok.

 

[Bleazle]

...maybe ok, but might not be, if I was you I would be mildly nervous....

Haha that's a classic line! I'll bet John would be more than "mildly nervous" as a result of reading that if he'd already bought the board...

 

[kiwijunglist]

I use HD4670 which i recon should be the minimun discrete ati gfx card for htpc. Here is a comparison between HD4670 and the HD4250/4290, you will see it's a lot faster in games, so that probably translates to better performance when viewing 1080i as well. HD4670 is still the same price ~$160 for 1gb model as when I bought the card more than 1 year ago, so you should buy a 2nd hand one for <$100 or go for the equivalent 5XXX card, which i can't advise you on.

 

[johns11]

Alright, it looks like it's back to the drawing board for me alright! Thanks for your advice KiwiJunglist. I was thinking of overclocking the 880g GPUs but have since cancelled that particular parts order. I've installed ATI 4550's in the past and don't seem (??) to have had any problems with them (apart from having to try every possible driver version until I finally found one that worked)... and this time round I need to buy 2 of everything without the wife noticing

 

[kiwijunglist]

I did *a lot* of research before i bought my card and HD4670 was definitely the best 4XXX card for HTPC. however i'm not sure if it's good value as you can now buy lots of 5XXX cards and the price hasn't droped much. The advantage of a 5XXX card is you can do DTS-HD audio if your Hifi supports this.

 

[5Hundred]

I've been using a 780G with amd dual core ht3 procesor (forget which one) and it does TV3 1080i no problem. Using vector adaptive and Powerdvd 8 Codec with hardware acceleration enabled, CPU typically sits between 10 and 20%. A lot of negativity surrounded these boards and the picture with 1080i when released but i believe most of the problems came from poor setup. If the 785G and 880G are advances on the 780G then i would presume they would also work fine.

 

[Bleazle]

My new HTPC (well 5 months old now) has a Sapphire Radeon HD5670 card - I looked at the 4??? (can't remember which one) but the difference in price was minimal so I figured I'd go with the 5670. I run everything (i.e. sound and picture) via HDMI to my amp then HDMI -> TV 1080p. To be honest my setup is overkill for an HTPC but I didn't want to have to upgrade again in a hurry and I was over the frustration of my old HTPC not having the grunt to play the 720p motocross files I download...