[OTHER] Matrox Parhelia: no luck (1 Viewer)

[V_J]

Hello,

I'm trying to run Mediaportal on Windows 7. My videocard is a Matrox Parhelia, which is listed in the hardware requirements.

At startup however, it doesn't seem to work.
In full screen mode, the software appears to hang on the splash screen "Initializing directX".
In windowed mode, I get an message stating that DirectX will use a software renderer and that it will be slow. I then get a fully transparent window with working menu bar.

Should MediaPortal work with the Parhelia? (xbmc does not work: it gives me a white screen where video should be, I thought it was because of pixel shaders < 2.0, but Moovida seems to have no problem; so it could well be the same problem I see with MediaPortal)

If it should, any thoughts for locating the problem?

Thanks!

Jörg

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

MEDIAPORTAL - free media center - MediaPortal Downloads

I suggest trying 1.0.2, the RC1 is a bit graphic intense, RC2 will be less of a resource hog graphically, as there has been lots of fixes in the GUI.

Also as none of us own that gpu, we are stuck as to whether it works or not with MP, in theory it should, if 256 or 512mb memory is allocated to gpu, make sure this is set in BIOS, also with latest drivers installed.

 

[V_J]

Thanks for the fast reply.

I am using the 1.0.2 (should have mentioned it ).

Could the problem be similar to xbmc, the pixel shader ? Or should MediaPortal give a slow output rather than a transparent window? IIRC, the Parhelia is not fully dx9 compliant; it also does not support the Aero interface. Currently, I'm using the latest driver (first and only display driver installed on a clean installation).

I'll check bios settings (but the bios is quite limited), and verify if the card is forced to single monitor output. The card only has 128 MB.

Is there any test software I could run (dxdiag shows no issues), or logfiles I could generate?

Thanks!

Jörg

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

The only times I have seen posts where SIS graphics have worked with MP, have had 256mb or more enabled and fully DX9 compliant.

The chances of troubleshooting this are extremely slim, especially if your gpu cannot process xbmc, which is a lesser gpu hog than MP

 

[V_J]

Well, the xmbc user interface works flawlessly (and the animations are smooth), but it cannot show video (just a blank screen). On Mediaportal, I don't even get the userinterface...

It is difficult to then find a mediacenter software for this computer: Windows Media Center and xmbc have a working interface but cannot play back video, MediaPortal is out, ... I guess it only leaves Moovida, but I have problems get gstreamer to properly handle the file types (e.g. haven't been successful in iso playback); I also don't really like the user interface.
I also tried running a virtual machine (e.g. virtualbox) with a dedicated mediacenter-OS, but performance is way too low.

On another forum, I got the suggestion of getting a stand alone mediastreamer, and this seems to be my best solution now.

Thanks for the support!
(if you want me to run some tests, just ask)

Jörg

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

So for xbmc video is the main problem only, thing is it could be codec related, what you could try is shark007's codec pack for Win7 and set xbmc to use windows own directshow filters, rather than its internal ones, these can all be selected inside the shark007 config.

Sorry not much help, good luck with your quest.

 

[V_J]

I'll give it a go tonight, but personally I doubt it to be codec related.
I tried with several files, including wmv, mpg, ... that play without problems in Windows Media Player.

But it can't hurt to try

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I suspect the graphics card may not support directx video acceleration or lack of memory, which a lot of current mpeg2\h.264 codecs use, so there is just not enough rendering done by the gpu to show video inside a GUI, ie xbmc and MP, WMP uses overlay, hence video work.

The other software is Boxee, you need to register, but it's free.

 

[V_J]

I read that boxee is based on xbmc code, so I assume it may run into similar issues.

Your explanation makes sense I guess, but playback in WMP is no problem. I'll try with the codec you posted.

 

[V_J]

Now this is embarrassing... I can't find how to change the playback codec in xbmc...
Guess I'll need a bit of more researching before I can test it...

But I had another idea: I can also try to configure an external player! If xbmc has a problem with rendering the video, an external player that can play back the video on its own should also work when called from xbmc, right?


Jörg