Questions from previous VMC user (1 Viewer)

[Hellman109]

Hi,

Ive only been using MP a day or so but I have some questions on the remote and recorded TV:

Remote:
I have a Logitech Harmony 785, I have it configured like a VMC remote.

1. If I was back at the desktop and pressed start on the remote, it would fire up VMC. How can I make it fire up MP? (currently it does nothing)
2. If I pressed guide it would goto the TV guide, Im 99% sure it still does this, HOWEVER, if I pressed guide when I was in the guide, it would go back to full screen TV. Can I make it do this in MP?

Recorded TV:
I presume it records the stream in a container like VMC does by default?

1. In VMC I used Media Centre Buddy to re-encode those streams to h264, to save an absolute truck load of space. it also used Comskip to remove the ads, It was a hands off process and ran in the times I set, it also moved the recordings to another folder and a subfolder by name.

I have setup the recorded TV to put it in a subfolder already.
I have setup the comskip plugin but it doesnt say much about how it works in regards to skipping in live/timeshift TV or recorded TV. My questions are: Can I re-encode the recorded TV to h264 or xvid easily? And remove ads? Also how does the TV series plugin work with this?

Guide:
OK I can see it pulls the over the air EPG guide, thats one big reason I moved. However SBS HD is not coming down, I have left it overnight and still no luck. Im in Brisbane, should it come down? Or can I force, say, the SBS SD channels EPG data onto the HD channel? If so how?

Skins:
Ive tried the default skin and the xface skin and I dont like either. The default skin is too... plain? And the xface is too.... noisy? Too many 'things' there. What is a good middle ground skin? Ill be trying the default wide skin tonight otherwise (16:9 50" plasma). At the moment the UI visually is better in VMC in my opinion.

Movies:
I added the IMDB source for the movie database, did a scan of all my movies and downloaded all the info..... buut it seems to have changed nothing in MP, or am I missing something?

Otherwise, are there any tips for a new MP user/previous VMC user?

Thanks for the answers.

 

[milhouse]

Welcome to MP. I've never used VMC myself, but your questions are straightforward enough. I'll take a shot at some of them...

1) make the remote start MP

MP doesn't do this natively - can't intercept commands if it's not running. However, I can recommend the IR Server Suite (also used for blasting your STB if you have one). It has a tray launcher which you can configure the way you are looking for. https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mce-replacement-plugin-165/ir-server-suite-version-1-0-4-1-a-33512/

2) make Guide button toggle between guide and fullscreen

Can't say that I've tried this, but the remote controls are fully configurable. I don't know exactly how MP uses the Harmony remote, though. If it was an MCE I'd tell you where to configure it. Try under remotes section in configuartion. It would be something along the lines of Guide->all layers->Condition window, tvguide->action->show fullscreen to set up the MCE remote Guide button to do this.

3) recorded TV and comskip and transcoding

Sorry, I'll have to defer to someone who uses comskip here. F

or the transcoding, there is a transcoding plugin that does what you want, though I don't know what the codec options are. MP plugin for Video Transcoding - Page 42 - MediaPortal Forum
Sorry - it's a huge thread.

4) Guide for HD channels

U.S. users don't have this luxury - I have to pay for a an EPG subscription. I'll defer to someone else...

5) Skin recommendation

You already named the two skins I use, and I haven't experimented much outside that (except the traditional Christmas skin). There are some screenshots of various skins here if you want to shop around. I've been meaning to try Butcher for awhile - it seems more middle-of-the-road.

6) Movie Database

So you scan your movies, and everything looks the same? Are you still looking at the Share view? That would be just like browsing directories. Switch the view to Title to see if it looks different. Personally, I manually add every movie record to keep things clean. The IMDB lookup add tons of worthless genres that I don't want, to I hand add them as I add to my collection. (To hand add, it's configuration->movies->movie database->editor.


No other major pointers for you - HTPC is a very personal matter, as you know. Just provide lots of details when asking questions (e.g. your comskip question may be easier to answer if we know whether you've got TV2 or TV Server running), be patient waiting for a reply, and look around the forum to see if some else has already asked (or answered) your questions.

Good luck, and enjoy.

Milhouse

 

[charli181]

Hi,

Recorded TV:
I presume it records the stream in a container like VMC does by default?

1. In VMC I used Media Centre Buddy to re-encode those streams to h264, to save an absolute truck load of space. it also used Comskip to remove the ads, It was a hands off process and ran in the times I set, it also moved the recordings to another folder and a subfolder by name.

I have setup the recorded TV to put it in a subfolder already.
I have setup the comskip plugin but it doesnt say much about how it works in regards to skipping in live/timeshift TV or recorded TV. My questions are: Can I re-encode the recorded TV to h264 or xvid easily? And remove ads? Also how does the TV series plugin work with this?

the comskip launcher plugin is a basic plugin that just calls comskip when the recording finishes. have a look at this forum thread for more advanced settings of comskip. It is a bit log winded but would be a good start on this topic
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...-commercials-via-mediaportal-5280/index4.html

Guide:
OK I can see it pulls the over the air EPG guide, thats one big reason I moved. However SBS HD is not coming down, I have left it overnight and still no luck. Im in Brisbane, should it come down? Or can I force, say, the SBS SD channels EPG data onto the HD channel? If so how?

Grabbing EPG over the air will not allow you to push the SD channels into the HD channels. If you are running the TV Server, you could write some triggers in MS SQL to copy that data into the HD channels. Alternatiely, there are a few EPG grabbers for Australia, that have the flexibility to only add details for particular channels. I see you have found this thread as well. Australian TV Guide - MediaPortal Forum
This program grabs the program guide from the internet and not from the TV Cards themselves.

On A side note,I don't have SBS but I heard somehwere they were not transmitting PEG at all, sounds like you are getting some of it.

 

[Hellman109]

Im running TVE3, and I get no data on the SBS HD channel, all others are now full and complete.

I also had a signal amplifier plugged into the aeriel, however MP was giving bad glitching with it, it made TV quite horrible. Wheras in VMC it stopped the pausing. Either way removing that helped.

The Guide button also worked in the second post, thanks allot.

And on the videos, now it shows the IMDB name (I noticed a couple are wrong) and a star rating. IMO the star rating adds nothing, Ill either want to watch it or not, I already have it, if I had to buy them, or download them, then it might be useful, but otherwise not so useful. And as my movie file names are correct, having the IMDB name didnt add anything. The other sorting options may be useful in future.

Now I have three new problems relating to TV...
1. PQ is bad. Namely things moving relative to the screen. For instace a shot of a footballer running across the field, but the camera panning with him, and everything else is sliding across. The everything else looks quite crap, you can tell every second line is being drawn independent so you get a barring effect across the edges of each object. I havent played with settings yet. For international people HD TV here is either 720p or 1080i, I would presume from my problems that it was 1080i, but I never had these problems in VMC. I presume codec changes/tweaks can fix it?

2. Timeshifting. Ive found it woeful at best. When timeshifting using the fast forward it is jerky, when I press play again, it pauses the picture again, the speakers pop, and it can take a few seconds for everything to re-sync again. Skipping has a similar problem. In general fast forward, rewinding, skipping etc. is just poor. Also general UI responsivness was very slow.
I have 3 HDDs in my HTPC too, one for scratch disc (timeshift disc), one for OS and one for recordings. I set this up in VMC too. The program in question was one I had preset to record. I also have comskip starting when a recording starts, and no changes to the thread priorities on anything. Ill try setting comskip to run at the end, is it low priority at default? any other suggestions?

 

[charli181]

Again, for comskip I would suggest posting those questions in the thread I suggested. You will get a better response from actual users of the plugin.

as for motion blur and interlacing issues, definitely sounds like a codec issue. I have never run VMC or XPMC for that fact so can't comment on the comparison you are expressing. I am running ffdshow with tomsmocomp de-interlacing. The video card I am using does not do any hardware de-interlacing - all software driven though the CPU does peak quite high on HD content. I can live with it. Others (like yourself maybe more critical of what you want/expect to see). There are some codec guides in the forum and on the wiki if you have a search

With ff/rew/skipping, I don't have the issues of popping through speakers, and within one second it will skip to the timeframe I have selected. I don't have a remote control but us a RF keyboard and do not use ff/rew. Again mybe a codec or soundcard driver issue?

The movies IMDB database is very useful if you have multiple shares containing movies or if you have a large collection of movies. That way you can search for a title name,etc. instead of scrolling through the entire list. It will also speeds up the display of the entire collection compared to the shares view.

 

[Hellman109]

My movies are all in one folder, hence why Im not seeing much benefit there but it will be useful once I go over 1 HDD worth of content.

The interlacing problems were fixed by using ffdshow codec and turning on the deinterlacing.

I have found a performance problem though, but first my setup counts here:
Leadtek DTV 2000H
1x 40GB HDD (system)
1x 40GB HDD (scratch disc, timeshift)
1x 320GB HDD (recorded TV/movies drive)
5200+ AMD Dual Core
2GB RAM
2400 pro
Vista ultimate


My interface issues seem to be performance related, last night when recording I could hardly get MP to start, it would respond VERY slowly. I looked in performance manager and there was allot of writing to the 320GB drive, as expected, by the SYSTEM process and Tvserver. No real reads on any of my drives. But performance was horrible, unusable infact, it should have been, and was with VMC, very good when recording, you basically didnt notice that it was. Is there anything I should look out for here? Im going to check where I stuck my page file, I cant remember, but CPU useage was pretty low the whole time and such.

Apart from that pretty happy with it so far

 

[Marcusb]

hey there, HTPC's are great, but such a stress cause

If you look in the MP folder, there is a log folder there, which can also be useful to see what is going on.

With regards to the FF/RW, I figure it's hard to stream that properly so most people here use the jump function. It's the left and right arrow key, either on the remote or keyboard. This triggers a series of user configurable jumps and is a much better way to move through a program.

With the responsiveness issue, my set up has a problem where the TV server uses up a lot of memory after runn ing for a very long time. My MP remains fair but other applications take ages, due to constant swapfile load.
I just set a scheduled task to kill and restart MP every night. No one else has ever reported something like this, so I am pretty sure it's just my set up.

 

[charli181]

If you think it is because of HDD activity and only happens when recording, I have seen instances where the high activity drives were slow because they were a secondary drive. (this was with a SATA drive). Moving it to the primary position resolved the issues. This maybe a way forward for yourself?????. CHeck your BIOS to see what position they are in. There should be bus 0 and bus 1 and each bus has a primary and secondary. Swapping them around should not cause issues, Unless you have some sort of RAID configured, but by your abovementioned specs, appears not.

 

[Hellman109]

The two 40GB drives are on one IDE controller, and the SATA drive is on a seperate controller (with a DVD burner).

Now the last real problem, and its annoying the hell out of me.

TV is VERY unstable for a couple of reasons, I believe they may be related...

DGindex crashes randomly when TVserver is running. I cant find any way to uninstall or work around this, but it crashes a fair bit.

The second problem is that sometimes it wont start TV saying 'unable to start graph' but other times it works fine.

Third problem is that about half the time the audio is out of sync, and gets worse and worse as you watch (after about 3 mins its upto 20 seconds out of sync bad).

I believe all 3 are related to dgindex myself, it crashes causing problems. However I cant find any way to fix or work around this.

Currently using ffdshow codecs for everything.

Thanks for the help so far everyone