Belgium
Hi there.
I've been trying to get Mediaportal and TVserver in a state where usable TV viewing would be possible. While I now have a stutterfree performance, I bumped into a couple of odd experiences, I'm just putting the results down here for any of you interested :
1) It would seem that certain mainboard/cpu combo's are simply impossible to get to work correctly with the current state of TVserver. I used a testbed with 4 different cpu's, mobo's and memory configs (and kept the VGA and HDD the same), (and this is completely independant of the used audio/video decoders, and independant of any build of both TVserver and Mediaportal since the last 3 weeks). Sadly I only have access to a PVR150 and a PVR150MCE, so I had no capability of looking into possible problems induced by the used TV card.
All machines got the same HDD (200 gig ATA, 7200rpm) and the same amount of memory (1.5 gig). All machines were clean installs of a legit XP pro, equiped with all available updates, net 2.0, no virusscanners nor antispyware, and for the test's sake all firewall functionality had been disabled thought the testbed.
When stutterfree playback was impossible on a given system, a second hdd was added on a seperate IDE/SATA channel (dependant of used mainboard) to exclude datarate problems from that side.
- an older Soltek I875 with a P4 2.8 was not able to get stutterfree playback
(medium sutter), the stutter became less when I'd switch to mpeg files instead of the standard TS files
- a VIA KM890 based MSI 754 was -totally- unusable : livestreaming became a slideshow of about 2 frames a second.
- an Asrock 754 GF6100 based machine did a good job, using the same processor as the VIA MSI mentioned before. No special setting was needed, it "ran out of the box".
- a SIS651 based SG71 Abit board with the same cpu as the Soltek provided totally clean and stutterfree playback, but ONLY if I completly disabled XP's virtual memory system, and kept everything in RAM. This is odd, as no other streaming solution had this kind of picky behaviour
2) Strange : whenever the playback stuttered, a test using TVservers "free recording/streaming" and capturing the result using VLC, it turned out that on the systems showing sutter, "bad frames" had been recorded on the exact times the stutter was visable.
3) Stranger : a machine which was incapable of stutterfree streaming/timeshifting would show the "bad frames" in the timeshift file, but when you chose "RECORD" instead, the resulting file was always errorfree and played back to Mediaportal without any problems.
All in all and in my humble opinion, Mediaportal itself is more or less ready for "Primetime", that's to say, people with very little knowledge can make it work. TVserver however still has a lot of work before this kind of status is achieved.
In any case, an impressive achievement so far, and I'm sure that given some time, most of the "oddities" will be solved too.
I've been trying to get Mediaportal and TVserver in a state where usable TV viewing would be possible. While I now have a stutterfree performance, I bumped into a couple of odd experiences, I'm just putting the results down here for any of you interested :
1) It would seem that certain mainboard/cpu combo's are simply impossible to get to work correctly with the current state of TVserver. I used a testbed with 4 different cpu's, mobo's and memory configs (and kept the VGA and HDD the same), (and this is completely independant of the used audio/video decoders, and independant of any build of both TVserver and Mediaportal since the last 3 weeks). Sadly I only have access to a PVR150 and a PVR150MCE, so I had no capability of looking into possible problems induced by the used TV card.
All machines got the same HDD (200 gig ATA, 7200rpm) and the same amount of memory (1.5 gig). All machines were clean installs of a legit XP pro, equiped with all available updates, net 2.0, no virusscanners nor antispyware, and for the test's sake all firewall functionality had been disabled thought the testbed.
When stutterfree playback was impossible on a given system, a second hdd was added on a seperate IDE/SATA channel (dependant of used mainboard) to exclude datarate problems from that side.
- an older Soltek I875 with a P4 2.8 was not able to get stutterfree playback
(medium sutter), the stutter became less when I'd switch to mpeg files instead of the standard TS files
- a VIA KM890 based MSI 754 was -totally- unusable : livestreaming became a slideshow of about 2 frames a second.
- an Asrock 754 GF6100 based machine did a good job, using the same processor as the VIA MSI mentioned before. No special setting was needed, it "ran out of the box".
- a SIS651 based SG71 Abit board with the same cpu as the Soltek provided totally clean and stutterfree playback, but ONLY if I completly disabled XP's virtual memory system, and kept everything in RAM. This is odd, as no other streaming solution had this kind of picky behaviour
2) Strange : whenever the playback stuttered, a test using TVservers "free recording/streaming" and capturing the result using VLC, it turned out that on the systems showing sutter, "bad frames" had been recorded on the exact times the stutter was visable.
3) Stranger : a machine which was incapable of stutterfree streaming/timeshifting would show the "bad frames" in the timeshift file, but when you chose "RECORD" instead, the resulting file was always errorfree and played back to Mediaportal without any problems.
All in all and in my humble opinion, Mediaportal itself is more or less ready for "Primetime", that's to say, people with very little knowledge can make it work. TVserver however still has a lot of work before this kind of status is achieved.
In any case, an impressive achievement so far, and I'm sure that given some time, most of the "oddities" will be solved too.
