FireDTV experiences (2 Viewers)

[marcelgl]

Hi all,

Im am considering to buy a DVB-C tuner for my HTPC. Since I live in the Netherlands a tuner with CI / CAM is required. Because my HTPC is a dedicated Philips machine with not so much space inside a FireDTV seems the best solution for me.

I have some open issues, so I was hoping that somebody wants to share it`s experiences.

- Does it work correctly with MP ?
- How is the integration e.g. the fireDTV comes with a remote, do I really need to use this one with MP or is it possible to operate everything via the MCE remote ?
- My provider also provides an EPG, will this one be available vie the FireDTV, or do I have to setup another EPG.

Any other usefull remarks/experiences are welcome.

Thanks ,
Marcel

 

[infinite.loop]

- Does it work correctly with MP ?

floppy-s and floppy-s2 are working like a charm here. tourette and The_Stig own a floppy-c and they seem pretty happy.

- How is the integration e.g. the fireDTV comes with a remote, do I really need to use this one with MP or is it possible to operate everything via the MCE remote ?

you choose which one MP uses in configuration.

- My provider also provides an EPG, will this one be available vie the FireDTV, or do I have to setup another EPG.

if you want to get epg from dvb then this works. if you prefer epg from a websource (xmltv) then this works too.

 

[corvy]

I have the floppydtv-c in use with conax cam on cable tv in Norway, and it works perfectly. I have opted to user xmltv since I think the EPG does not work to well, but if this is an issue with my cable company, floppydtv or other I dont know.

The best solution I can think of for dtv on HTPC

 

[octane]

I have a FloppyDVT C/CI connected to Swedish ComHem. I have only hade it for a week only but so far I am very pleased. One of the possitive things with it is that with MP I can record more the one channel if the are on the same MUX, with only one tuner. So far I have recorde 3 channels at the same time. I will try with 4 or 5 to night and see how that works. I have no problem with S3 standby from the TV Server but with tha MP Client (singel site) I can't get the pc to standby. So the conclusion is that the FloopyDTV has no problem with S3 standby.

/Octane

 

[fpouels]

You might still consider the FloppyDTV (light) if you have a Philips MCP9350i or alike. They have a free pci slot available. The FloppyDTV connect with firewire but it can be mounted in the pci slot.

I use the light version (no remote) and control everything through MP and the MCE remote. EPG is your choice, I still use GrabTvNl.

 

[plind]

Hi Marcel,

I have a HTPC (based on AMD 690G) up and running since the halfway November, including a DVB-C FloppyDTV (connected to Casema DTV). The HTPC is connected via HDMI to my new Toshiba 32C3500P lcd tv. At first I thought the Toshiba tuner did quite a good job processing and displaying the analog signal (especially compared to what I saw in several shops). But the signal via the FloppyDTV is definitely in a whole different league: it's at least three to four times better. I also find it at least twice as good as any DVB-C settopbox I have seen untill now.

The whole bunch runs on Vista Ultimate with Media Portal 0.2.3 and I'm also very satisfied with the latter. It works great with FloppyDTV.

There are two drawbacks, though:
1. I find it quite hard getting the right info on how to best configure what codecs for my setup, so I have spent quite some time tweaking around and now I'm quite happy (although I do still think there is more to gain).
2. I do have occasional problems that can take up quite some time to resolve. Recently Casema have changed a bunch of their DVB-T channels and I could not get FloppyDTV to find these again; I solved it with some manual labour. Also, I get the feeling that certain combinations of codec, settings and ATI display drivers cause trouble. But that does not seem to be FloppyDTV related.

Anyway, I would defintely buy a FloppyDTV again, so I can wholeheartedly recommend it to you. (BTW, as you might know: there is no (eletronical) difference between the FireDTV and FloppyDTV. It's just that the FireDTV is a FloppyDTV in an external box; the FloppyDTV is also connected to the pc (internally) via firewire)).

Pascal.

 

[ThaClown]

plind:
Could you post your codec settings for TV? I have a Fire DTV-C and im still sometimes getting some problems with the codecs....
And I am missing 4 or 5 channels very strange....

 

[plind]

Could you post your codec settings for TV?

For starters, first a resume of my setup: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, Athlon X2 BE-2400, 2GB, FloppyDTV, Vista Ultimate - using the onboard HDMI interface of the ATI X1250. All is connected to a 720p Toshiba 32C3500P lcd tv. Currently I have ATI Catalyst drivers 7.12 installed.

Here are my settings:
* MPEG-2 Video decoder: NVIDIA Video Decoder (PureVideo) in which I use hardware acceleration. As I understand, this uses VMR9 to access the hardware functions. I've set VMR9 to exclusive mode. The decoder hardware settings are set in the ATI control panel and all is set to automatic.
* MPEG-2 Audio decoder: NVIDIA Audio Decoder
* Postprocessing: ffdshow with:
1. Levels, setting the left Input slider to 16 to get a better black image (and compensate for video signal range of 16-230 instead of 0-255)
2. Resize & aspect, upscaling to 1280x720 using Lanczos (nr of taps: 4,00 (2x)), Luma sharpen 1,40, Chroma sharpen 1,20 and accurate rounding.

Notes:
* I still find the digital TV image to be "slow" to the eye. Movement seems to lag a bit. In addition, panning isn't smooth. Especially for this I'm still looking for better configurations, hence my experiments descibed below.
* at first I used ffdshow for (software) decoding as well, but I found that this was too heavy on the CPU if I combined it with several postprocessing filters.
* I also tried the much recommended PowerDVD 7.3 decoder, which in my case is not noticably better than the NVIDIA PureVideo decoder. During these experiments, I did have a freeze or two, so just to be sure it wasn't PowerDVD, I moved back to NVIDIA PureVideo.
* Last week I read that EVR is the successor to VMR9 and it's embedded into Vista. So that should be the better choice. I disabled VMR9 exclusive mode and enabled EVR, which at first worked well, but then I got an occasional freeze, which took me a long time to recover from. I decided to move back to VMR9 (not knowing for sure if the freezes were caused by EVR).
* Strangely enough, if I use VMR9, I cannot select a deinterlacing mode manually: I then get a flickering black screen. If I use EVR, I *can* select a deinterlacing mode manually. Hmmm... so is EVR the better choice anyway then?
* As for the FloppyDTV channels: I did experience some problems with finding channels lately (I posted questions in the Dutch FireDTV forum). In that area it does not work 100% flawless yet, but I now have the channels I want, so I'm not really worried about it.

I love to hear other peoples experiences and settings. Please share! I'm always looking for further optimization. (Aren't we all? )

Pascal

 

[pnyberg]

plind

You must use EVR in Vista if you want any HW accelaration at all from your GFX card. And the de-interlace setting in MP should be "None" - since you control this from the CCC. And if I recall it correctly, using ffdshow as post processing also disables HW acceleration on the GFX card. So in that case you will NOT benefit from the AVIVO features of the ATI cards.

Also the Purevideo drivers is rather old these days - I would recommend you use Cyberlinks drivers since they are the only drivers for sure that can utilize the new features of the GFX cards (Such as AVIVo for ATI and Purevideo of Nvidia). And in my opinion the GFX cards produces way better picture quality than software based (such as ffdshow). The only problem I have is the bug in the ATI drivers (red shift problem when "pulldown detection" is enabled)

Regarding the original topic of this thread I´m very happy with my FireDTV. I only have experience of my other Asustek Europa II hybrid card (SAA7134), and compared to that the FireDTV is waaaayyyyy better. Faster zapping times, rock stable in comparison.

See my spec for details of my setup.

Cheers.

 

[plind]

pnyberg

Thanks very much for your tips. I didn't know that ffdshow disabled hw acceleration. I've set things to EVR again, using PowerDVD as decoder. I disabled ffdshow and I'm very surprised by the huge improvement in the deinterlacing: the image is no longer "slow" or "lagging" as I described earlier; the movement is now very natural! Brilliant!!

However, the image is now a bit softer and I feel it can be a bit more black. That was exactly what I used ffdshow for. Do you (or anyone else) know of another way to benefit from hw acceleration and at the same time apply a bit of sharpening and level correction?

Thanks!

Pascal.