Time to use MP with Vista? (1 Viewer)

[cosmos]

Hi all,
any suggestions ... is it the right time now to change with MP to Vista OS or is it better to wait half an year? What improvements i will get if i use MP with Vista. I know Vista will be the future but what are the improvements now (stabitilty, speed, etc.??)
Thanks for the response ...

cosmos

 

[Bram]

There will only be disatvantages in using MP with vista at this moment. The hardwaresupport (drivers) for Vista is very poor compared to XP. If there are drivers they're mostly in beta stage.
Also, Vista consumes 500MB RAM, idle. The unattended XP installation I've made for myself (including all software I ever need) only uses 150MB of ram, idle.
Also, as far as I have understood, the included TV-engine (v2) is not supported by Vista. You'll have to use the TVengine 3 which is under heavy development and far from stable. This TVengine needs SQL Express which will consume even more ram. 2GB RAM looks like a minimum for smooth use of MP on Vista, especialy when using the TVengine3.

For now there is no reason to switch to Vista. There is reason to stick with XP.

Don't get me wrong. I do like Vista and I'm running it on my not-HTPC since day 1.

 

[Marcusb]

Why on earth would you want to use very new beta software to run something as crucial as an HTPC (for which reliability is paramount)?

MP has come along way and is now more stable than ever. Win XP has also come a long way and is very stable. It's not wise to ever be the first to use the latest MS OS when it first comes out, especially if it isn't truly released yet.

I know MP is also Beta, but seriously, given the choice between established reliable software and software that is brand new and from a company that has a reputation for possibly releasing things a little too early it should be pretty clear what to do.

 

[Vasek]

Dont know much about English versions of XP, however I have Czech XP MCE and I would never buy it again. Actually it is English XP PRO pathed at the end of installation process to Czech XP MCE. So for example some language specific drivers like Realtek HD Audio do not install, because system says it is Czech but demands English version of driver (manual install after 2 days of examinations helped).
So even all texts are normally partly in Czech and partly in English. And yestarday (after PowerScheduler hibernate and manual wake up) switched fully to English!!!
So I'm bit worried of new Vista, but hope it will be more compact. I do not know what to expect from XP MCE anymore (however who knows with windows i general...) Czech Vista will be in 3-4 month, I'll see...

 

[arfster]

I've been running MP with Vista for a while now. Assuming you have drivers for your kit, it's totally stable. However, there are occasional bugs - a major one was WebEPG not working at all, but the lovely coders fixed that one straight away when i bugreported it.

Another one is odd, and somewhat irritating: 50fps material flickers horrendously in the preview/EPG windows (but not in fullscreen playback, which is perfect). It doesn't happen with 25fps stuff, whether film carried in a 50fps stream or weaved interlaced material. You can fix it by perma-weaving, but that makes the main picture a bit jerky when there's lot of motion. This is possibly a driver bug, although it doesn't occur in any other DVB app. Probably this will be a tricky one to fix, so I'm going to try experiment a bit to get more idea of the cause before bugreporting it.

As for RAM requirements, you can run it perfectly smoothly in 1GB. Vista appears to use a lot of ram for caching/buffer purposes, but in reality it's more like 350mb when things are stressed a bit more. You could also reduce that significantly by turning off various services, the aero interface, sidebar etc etc etc.


Howevvvvvvvvvvver, the major point is above: why bother? The only real benefit from running Vista will be when they code support for the Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR), which is considerably superior to VMR9 with regard to syncing/framedrop/jitter/tearing etc.

 

[Frodo]

I use run MP (+tvserver v3) on Vista at home.
If there are (good) drivers for your h/w then vista runs great.
However the drivers are the biggest problem...
For example, nvidia does have vista drivers, but for htpc they are not usable yet.

The only real benefit from running Vista will be when they code support for the Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR), which is considerably superior to VMR9 with regard to syncing/framedrop/jitter/tearing etc.

This sounds interesting... time to look at it;-)

Frodo

 

[arfster]

However the drivers are the biggest problem...
For example, nvidia does have vista drivers, but for htpc they are not usable yet.

That's putting it kindly

Out of curiousity, have you seen the preview 50fps flicker bug I described above? Not sure if it's something specific with my setup, but I can't bring myself to bugreport it without any real details.

 

[FReT]

I'm running a dual boot with XP and Vista at the moment, with separate MP installs for both. This way if i get bugs in Vista I can just boot into my "stable" XP version if required.

I had plenty of issues at the start, but I now use the Vista version 95% of the time. Nvidia and Soundblaster drivers are still a long way off perfect for Vista, but it works well enough for me to use ATM. I only have 1 gig of ram and it runs quite smoothly, even in HD.

As people are saying though, unless you enjoy playing tweaking and troubleshooting new technology, it's probably not worth going to Vista just yet, give it another month or two I'd say. Depends on your system setup and driver support I suppose. Nvidia and Creative are lagging a bit with their driver support ATM (I actually use an old Nvidia XP driver on Vista as the new ones suck).

 

[infinite.loop]

one thing regarding Vista. you may have to disable UAC.

 

[tesamu]

one thing regarding Vista. you may have to disable UAC.

...or run as Administrator and in compatibility mode.

IR-blaster (MyBlaster or MCE Replacement plugin) does not work in Vista yet.