MediaPortal woes (1 Viewer)

[Paranoid Delusion]

Might be worthwhile doing a clean install of XP as well, sorry but when you use a lot of different software, that does the same job, really can screw things up, it leaves bits so deep inside the OS, nothing will ever work reliably.

So install XP, all updates including latest Directx plus all the latest drivers for your pc, then any necessary modifications as per here, make sure all filters needed for video\audio installed (mpeg2\divx etc, make sure these work within windows ok), reboot, then install Mediaportal.

Sounds like hard work, but its a lot easier to do above, than scratching your head trying to figure out what has gone wrong.

Hopefully you should then have a trouble free experience with MP.

 

[Karamu]

Might be worthwhile doing a clean install of XP as well, sorry but when you use a lot of different software, that does the same job, really can screw things up, it leaves bits so deep inside the OS, nothing will ever work reliably.

The thing was overdue for a clean install anyway, what I really want to do is run MythDora on it instead of Windows (leaning more towards Linux) but everyone else in my family is used to Windows not Linux. =P

 

[Karamu]

Ok, I'll just bump this back up, I have updated my situation. I have a complete fresh install of Windows on it now, the card arrived, I've got everything installed, it picks up all the channels ok, it picks up EPG ok, but, it STILL isn't going.

It seems to timeshift alright?

I'm only two kilometers away from the transmitter, it should be working like a dream.

EDIT: I'm not sure if this will help, but, everytime I close anything MediaPortal, HcwHelper.exe crashes and the Microsoft error comes up.

 

[Karamu]

Bumping this to the top of the board.

Anyways, I managed to find a spare ATI 9600XT, so I installed that into the machine, and I've done some reading around about H.264 and with the CyberLink codec I've gotten digital to work! With the FX 5200 in there, it was horribly slow, but the 9600XT helped a bit, but I'm still having huge performance issues. The audio runs at full speed and sounds incredible, but the video is out of sync with the audio by a huge margin on the HD channels (it's also choppy and occasionally pixelated) and less so on SD widescreen-enabled channels, and the video is just a bit choppy on the non-widescreen SD channels.

So yeah, I'm glad to have it work, but I want it to work at full speed, we suspect that its the hardware that is the drawback now, we actually are able to get some better hardware for it if we need to but it takes time. =)

 

[jburnette]

Bumping this to the top of the board.

Anyways, I managed to find a spare ATI 9600XT, so I installed that into the machine, and I've done some reading around about H.264 and with the CyberLink codec I've gotten digital to work! With the FX 5200 in there, it was horribly slow, but the 9600XT helped a bit, but I'm still having huge performance issues. The audio runs at full speed and sounds incredible, but the video is out of sync with the audio by a huge margin on the HD channels (it's also choppy and occasionally pixelated) and less so on SD widescreen-enabled channels, and the video is just a bit choppy on the non-widescreen SD channels.

So yeah, I'm glad to have it work, but I want it to work at full speed, we suspect that its the hardware that is the drawback now, we actually are able to get some better hardware for it if we need to but it takes time. =)

I used to run a 2.4ghz P4 (I've only got a 2.8 now) as well. I'm not sure if the channel you're trying to watch is 1080p or 720p, but I am able to decode 720p h.264 fine ONLY if I use CoreAVC as my h.264 codec. I've tried using the Cyberlink one, but it's just not quick enough to handle it on my system. From what I understand, and I may be wrong on this, CoreAVC is the only h.264 codec that will "break" standard when decoding thus saving you precious CPU cycles. You might give it a shot and see if it helps any at all. If you're trying to playback a 1080p channel then I seriously doubt you'll have any luck with that processor.

 

[Karamu]

Well, I just tried the CoreAVC decoder, and it has worse results than the Cyberlink one, unfortunately. =(

There are three HD channels on the DVB-T system here in New Zealand. Two of them (TV ONE and TV2) are 720p and the other (TV3) is 1080i. There isn't any 1080p channels here yet. =P

EDIT: Hmm, from looking at the requirements, we have it alright for 720p running at 24 or 30 frames per second, according to Wikipedia, broadcasted 720p runs at 50/60 frames per second, and 1080i similar but in fields per second. That's a shame...

Looks like time to upgrade.