Has ANYONE gotten TV running without probs? (1 Viewer)

[SweMart]

My tv can't handle 50hz. It's a 42" plasma panel connected with DVI->HDMI. I can only use 60hz, 72hz and 75hz. Any other frequency I get a black screen on with the message "no signal", in other words the frequency selected is not supported by the plasma panel.

Any other ideas?

Is your TV labled "HD-ready"? If so then it MUST accept 50Hz via HDMI. It's part of the "certification". I had the same problem when I first installed my Samsung LCD 2 years ago, the Nvidia drivers didn't allow me to set 50Hz. I found out that I had to create a custom resolution. In newer drivers this is a whole lot easier, just force it to run at 50Hz.

Three things that dramatically improved my picture quality:
1. Most important - 50Hz refresh rate
2. Latest and greatest Nvidia drivers
3. Picture calibration. If you can do it yourself you can buy a special DVD called DVE(Digital Video Essentials) which makes the calibration easy. Most TVs needs to be calibrated on each source(i.e Scart, Svideo, HDMI etc).

 

[Ronner]

I have made a custom resolution for 1024x768 @ 50hz.. to no avail.. Black Screen. I can only run 60, 72, and 75hz.

Got the lastest drivers and yes I have calibrated my plasma, but that has nothing to do with refreshrates or crappy mpeg2 quality.

 

[SweMart]

Well, HD-Ready means that it MUST be able to handle the following resolutions using HDMI(or DVI)

HD capable inputs accept the following HD video formats:
1280x720 @ 50 and 60Hz progressive scan (“720p”), and
1920x1080 @ 50 and 60Hz interlaced (“1080i”)

(c) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hd_ready

If your native resoultion is 1024x768 it probably won't be pixelmapped but still 50Hz will dramatically improve picture quality. Set your resolution to 720p and try it out! The desktop will probably look a bit funky but it doesn't matter that much within Mediaportal.

If you hookup a HDMI device(like a PS3 or a BluRay player) to your TV it will send a 720p signal(or 1080i).

 

[phunqe]

If you have the "HD-Ready" sticky on your TV (or it says it's "HD-Ready" in the manual or on the box) you should either call up your dealer or Samsung directly and ask them what crap they have sold you.
Perhaps not starting with using the word "crap", but if they start giving you hassle.

 

[Ronner]

If you have the "HD-Ready" sticky on your TV (or it says it's "HD-Ready" in the manual or on the box) you should either call up your dealer or Samsung directly and ask them what crap they have sold you.
Perhaps not starting with using the word "crap", but if they start giving you hassle.

The TV is fine, trust me. TV looks perfect when I'm using my Samsung DCB-H360R on it so it simply has to do with the pc setup/mediaportal/codecs.

Movies look fine with mediaportal, it's just TV that looks as if it's slightly blurry or that it misses some frames or something. It's simply not as smooth as my Samsung DCB-H360R.

but besides that, I simply can't get this whole tv thing stable within mediaportal. Channel switching is slow and often unresponsive. Switching to a HD channel is horendously slow and usually I have to turn the TV within mediaportal off and back on again for it to accept the switch.. It's simply not usable in the current state it's in and I have no clue what's wrong. I got all state of the art hardware and yet it's still not as good as my Samsung DCB-H360R quality-wise, and stability-wise it's simply not useable.

 

[upspace]

spending several nights getting mp properly to work with tv inbuilt and tv server i gave up (although i love media portal and did not want to go away from it) and switched to dvbviewer pro. you pay 15 euros but get a decent media center (music, video, osd etc. not as nice and navigation not as easy as media portal of course) but rock solid, fast performant and not so resource hungry htpc ui.

perfect for dvb-s viewing. it starts up faster uses less cpu, gets epg data faster and more complete, channel switching is incredible fast, havent tried hd channels... don't want to blame media portal but just give hope for people that don't get media portal to work like ronner and me...

will come back and give it a try with new architecture version II (which will be a while since tv is not in scope for first alpha - hey guys the tv part is the weakest part in media portal and should be the main topic to move to a new architecture and addressed first for prototyping. sorry just my blabla)

 

[Ronner]

Upspace.. The FireDTV viewer which comes with the floppydtv dvb-c receiver is based on dvbviewer and I hate it. I can't set the aspect ratio in it and tbh the channel switching is just as slow as in MediaPortal. Same goes for the quality of the screen, which is ofcourse also based on the same mpeg codecs that your system has running.

I simply think that Digital TV on PC is too new to match up with the quality of set-top-boxes.

 

[gibman]

You must be doing something wrong here.

Normally PC's are far superior to STB's and DVD players.
But only if set up correctly.

The hardware scaler on your gfx card is often of much better quality in the one present in your TV and/or STB/DVD.

Using something like zoomplayer with ffdshow filter doing some factor 3-4 upscaling does sweeten up the image quite a lot.
Zoomplayer is a directshow based player just like MP is.

/gibman

 

[Ronner]

thx for the info gibman, but it doesnt help me much...

I was under the impression that a pc would be superior to stb's etc as well, but in practice it appears not to be the case.

What I would love is a guide on where to go from scratch.. A fresh windows install and then? Which steps to take in installing everything, which codecs to use, which settings to use for codecs/filters etc.etc.. to achieve the best quality and performance, cuz so far I haven't seen any. It's simply one big jungle of codecs you have to go through and try on random as it seems.

I would love the day that my Mediaportal can outperform my STB both quality and performance-wise, but right now I have a feeling that day is quite a long time away.

 

[Taipan]

I've made sure that the floppydtv and the alphacrypt are all up to date firmware-wise and driver-wise and I've tried all kinds of things to test if it's just the setup or not. I've tried installing MCE2005 as well and that also gives the same crappy quality. FireDTV-Viewer, same thing.
Am I the only one having such major issues with how crap it works and looks, compared to an external decoder or am I really having a screwed up set up?

It sounds to me like the "crappy quality" you are getting is due to the FireDTV card and not MediaPortal, as it seems you get the same poor quality in MCE2005 and FireDTV-Viewer - is that correct?


I only use DVB-T (no DVB-C) and the picture quality that I get with MediaPortal is much better than any STB that I have ever seen ....