Has ANYONE gotten TV running without probs? (3 Viewers)

[Ronner]

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 ....

Correct. Same quality in all ways of setting it up. However, i doubt it's cuz of the FireDTV Card. It's a state of the art card (from what I hear on various forums including this one). DVB-C is usually also better in quality than DVB-T since DVB-T has less bandwidth as oposed to DVB-C and this needs to compress the mpeg2 streams more than with DVB-C. Besides, the only thing the FireDTV card does is capture the mpeg2 streams digitally. Signal quality is excellent and thus the digital information is there, just as good as the STB will get it. It's just the way it gets processed afterwards that's making the difference.

You say your quality is better than any stb you ever seen, but you have it connected to a DLP Projector. Have you ever DIGITALLY connected an STB to a 42" Plasma screen? (mind you, eventhough your source (dvb-t) may be digital, your connection as scart or vga or svga or composit etc is NOT digital and thus influences the picture quality greatly.)

I Invite everyone to come take a look at my STB on my TV and my HTPC on my TV.. STB wins it hands down. sadly enough

 

[gibman]

I am using a infocus in76 DLP projector at native 1280x720p@50hz PAL on a 122" 16:9 screen.
The PJ is connected thorugh a HDMI cable from the HTPC running MP (obviously). Sound is connected with toslink cable to my ac3/dts amp.

Watching dvb-s and dvb-t stuff is quite good.

u need to make sure of the following;

1) is the video codec running with hardware accelration (it does wonders for deinterlacing)
Try watching a football match without HW decoding and u can see the diff.
2) 50 hz on the output of ur gfx card.
3) obey native resolution (pixel mapping) of the display device.
4) use dvi/hdmi cable.
5) use latest gfx drivers.
6) use well known and well tested video codec. (cyberlink, nvidia etc) and again make sure they are running in HW accel. mode.

Try to hook up a plain monitor to see if it's ok ...

/gibman

 

[Taipan]

Same quality in all ways of setting it up. However, i doubt it's cuz of the FireDTV Card. It's a state of the art card.

OK, then the cause must be something else that is common to all 3 applications - like the video card, the video card drivers, or the video decoder?

Is your video card set to display the extended colour space of 0-255 (the default is often 16-235, which gives a "flat" image)?

You say your quality is better than any stb you ever seen, but you have it connected to a DLP Projector. Have you ever DIGITALLY connected an STB to a 42" Plasma screen?

I am not getting into a debate about the merits of DLP versus Plasma ... BTW, what is the native resolution of your Plasma display, and what refresh rate and resolution do you have your video card set to?

 

[Ronner]

I am using a infocus in76 DLP projector at native 1280x720p@50hz PAL on a 122" 16:9 screen.
The PJ is connected thorugh a HDMI cable from the HTPC running MP (obviously). Sound is connected with toslink cable to my ac3/dts amp.

Watching dvb-s and dvb-t stuff is quite good.

u need to make sure of the following;

1) is the video codec running with hardware accelration (it does wonders for deinterlacing)
Try watching a football match without HW decoding and u can see the diff.
2) 50 hz on the output of ur gfx card.
3) obey native resolution (pixel mapping) of the display device.
4) use dvi/hdmi cable.
5) use latest gfx drivers.
6) use well known and well tested video codec. (cyberlink, nvidia etc) and again make sure they are running in HW accel. mode.

Try to hook up a plain monitor to see if it's ok ...

/gibman

1. Yes
2. No. TV does not accept 1024x768 on 50hz. It does on 1280x720 however then the desktop is not fully shown on the screen (yes it's single display so it's not cuz of dual display stuff). The native resolution is 1024x768 and I'd like to keep it that way cuz of pixel-mapping
3. See nr 2.
4. I have dvi to hdmi
5. Also done
6. I tried pretty much all. Quality differs from codec to codec, but all are simply not as good as my STB, plus all seem to have a slower fps than my STB. MIND you, the picture quality isn't BAD. The picture quality is just a little blurry, especially when what's on screen is moving.

the picture quality is not really my biggest problem. the BIG problem is simply not getting it to run stable. Switching channels is slow and buggy and often crashes. I can't use TVe2 cuz it starts stuttering like hell after a short while and TVe3 runs better but channel switching remains the same buggy and unstable.

OK, then the cause must be something else that is common to all 3 applications - like the video card, the video card drivers, or the video decoder?

Is your video card set to display the extended colour space of 0-255 (the default is often 16-235, which gives a "flat" image)?

I am not getting into a debate about the merits of DLP versus Plasma ... BTW, what is the native resolution of your Plasma display, and what refresh rate and resolution do you have your video card set to?

Videocard is fine, drivers are fine (latest and also tried others), same goes for decoders, tried various of them, and also on fresh re-installs of windows.

My vidcard is set to 32bit, and my image is not flat, it's simply a little blurry when what's on screen is moving. My STB doesnt have that, my HTPC does. Also, not that EVERYTHING else works fine. DVD's play fine, movies in general run fine, including 720p and 1080i hd stuff. It's just the TV that isn't stable enough. And its also not the picture quality that bothers me the most (though it's annoying that my stb has better quality). it's simply the stability of it that annoys me. channel switching is next to impossible cuz it's slow and buggy and crashes often.

My native resolution is 1024x768 and I can not set it to 50hz on it's native reso. On 1280x720 I can set it to 50hz but then Im missing part of my desktop.

but like i said. stability is my main issue. Once that is sorted then I can look into quality.

 

[THDBASED]

I am using a infocus in76 DLP projector at native 1280x720p@50hz PAL on a 122" 16:9 screen.
The PJ is connected thorugh a HDMI cable from the HTPC running MP (obviously). Sound is connected with toslink cable to my ac3/dts amp.

Watching dvb-s and dvb-t stuff is quite good.

u need to make sure of the following;

1) is the video codec running with hardware accelration (it does wonders for deinterlacing)
Try watching a football match without HW decoding and u can see the diff.
2) 50 hz on the output of ur gfx card.
3) obey native resolution (pixel mapping) of the display device.
4) use dvi/hdmi cable.
5) use latest gfx drivers.
6) use well known and well tested video codec. (cyberlink, nvidia etc) and again make sure they are running in HW accel. mode.

Try to hook up a plain monitor to see if it's ok ...

/gibman

Is there a good reason to output 50hz? I have bad SD TV quality too and I am running 1366X768 at 60Hz, should I try to run at 50hz or would that not make a difference?
I first thought that my cable signal was to blame for bad TV quality but my new Samsung TV is displaying TV in very nice quality. On my HTPC the images are blurred, flat and have gosthing...

 

[Ronner]

Thx THDBased! The word I was looking for was ghosting It's the best way to describe my symptoms. I used the words "lack of fps" but the better way to describe it is indeed ghosting.

 

[SweMart]

I am using a infocus in76 DLP projector at native 1280x720p@50hz PAL on a 122" 16:9 screen.
The PJ is connected thorugh a HDMI cable from the HTPC running MP (obviously). Sound is connected with toslink cable to my ac3/dts amp.

Watching dvb-s and dvb-t stuff is quite good.

u need to make sure of the following;

1) is the video codec running with hardware accelration (it does wonders for deinterlacing)
Try watching a football match without HW decoding and u can see the diff.
2) 50 hz on the output of ur gfx card.
3) obey native resolution (pixel mapping) of the display device.
4) use dvi/hdmi cable.
5) use latest gfx drivers.
6) use well known and well tested video codec. (cyberlink, nvidia etc) and again make sure they are running in HW accel. mode.

Try to hook up a plain monitor to see if it's ok ...

/gibman

Is there a good reason to output 50hz? I have bad SD TV quality too and I am running 1366X768 at 60Hz, should I try to run at 50hz or would that not make a difference?
I first thought that my cable signal was to blame for bad TV quality but my new Samsung TV is displaying TV in very nice quality. On my HTPC the images are blurred, flat and have gosthing...

Try watching football using 60Hz, It'll be a laugh.

 

[Ronner]

Try watching football using 60Hz, It'll be a laugh.

Did that yesterday actually and it's not so much of a laugh. What should there be to laugh about?


Anyway.. I took the firedtv card into a different pc. Quite high-end (core2duo 6850, 8800gtx, 2gigs crucial ballistix etc.) machine as well. Installed all needed (bda drivers, firedtv, mediaportal, tve3, mysql, codecs etc.).

It looks like the zapping is at least more stable and all in all i generally is a more stable, however the picture quality remains the same.. Like I said, it's not bad, but sorta looks like slight ghosting and my STB still outperforms this machine.

Another thing that is weird is that when I switch a channel, it plays the last couple seconds of what was timeshifted before it plays the new channel. Quite lame and amateuristic to see that happen when changing the channel. I'd rather have the screen go black and stay black until it starts playing the new channel, but perhaps that's simply a feature

And yet another thing, I'm having this bug where when you change the channel it starts playing all the way back to the beginning of what was timeshifted on the old channel. So if I watched one channel for say 5 minutes, and I change it to another channel, you see the changing the channel thing in progress and then it starts playing from the beginning of the 5 minutes I was watching the previous channel.. If I fastforward then I end up in the new-channel. Is this a known bug?

 

[gibman]

Dude, try for one second and turn off your plasma/lcd TV and put it on a shelf ... as I think it's the one bothering you.
Now for test purposes setup an old VGA monitor 4:3 or a normal PC LCD monitor to your HTPC. VGA or DVI connection .. doesnt matter in this test scenario.

Now feed the PC monitor with a refresh rate of 50hz.
How does it look like now ?

If it looks good, and vertical panning is ok without juddering etc. then u have a problem with your HTPC TV.

The channel change stuff should be fixed when using the new tsreader filter.
search the forum for info about it.

You need to test things isolated.

Also if the picture seems washed out or something, try and tinker with the brightness/contrast options of your gfx card.
The "3d color panel" with ATI seems to do the trick here.

This is easiest done if u put MP into "windowed mode" ..hit alt+enter when u start MP up. Now u are able to play around with color settings in the background while seeing the result realtime. This is difficult if u have MP fullscreened.

/gibman

 

[Ronner]

Dude, try for one second and turn off your plasma/lcd TV and put it on a shelf ... as I think it's the one bothering you.
Now for test purposes setup an old VGA monitor 4:3 or a normal PC LCD monitor to your HTPC. VGA or DVI connection .. doesnt matter in this test scenario.

Now feed the PC monitor with a refresh rate of 50hz.
How does it look like now ?

If it looks good, and vertical panning is ok without juddering etc. then u have a problem with your HTPC TV.

The channel change stuff should be fixed when using the new tsreader filter.
search the forum for info about it.

You need to test things isolated.

Also if the picture seems washed out or something, try and tinker with the brightness/contrast options of your gfx card.
The "3d color panel" with ATI seems to do the trick here.

This is easiest done if u put MP into "windowed mode" ..hit alt+enter when u start MP up. Now u are able to play around with color settings in the background while seeing the result realtime. This is difficult if u have MP fullscreened.

/gibman

I'll try putting it on a PC monitor on 50hz, though I do think this is sorta BS since what use is it for me to have it work on a 50hz PC monitor while I want it to work on my plasma. Everything else works fine on the 60hz or 75hz or any hz I set my plasma to. Movies, games etc. in all shapes and sizes (PAL/NTSC 25/30fps or mucho higher for games etc.) so I dont see why a simple refreshrate change should make such a huge difference in screen quality.

But if you think it's my plasma that's screwing things up then explain why my stb looks fine on the same plasma. Custom refresh of 1280x720@50hz on the htpc shows half a screen so I wonder what resolution and refresh rate my stb is pumping out. I wonder if there is a way to find that out.