- November 3, 2008
- 68
- 3
First, the following is for a 64bit Win8 Pro install on an AMD system+4Gb RAM. No idea if a 32bit install or an Intel CPU would behave differently.
1: I had a lot of trouble finding drivers that would work in 64bit with 4Gb RAM enabled. The Win8 bundled drivers and downloaded updates ALL failed. I was surprised, they've had several years to get this sorted out and raises some serious questions about driver support in general and Microsofts testing regime. If building a dedicated HTPC not really a problem, just lock down to <4Gb or use a 32bit install. But I now have quite a lot of hardware that either won't work or will crash Win8 instantly.
2: MP 1.3.0.beta TVService needs running in XP SP3 compatibility mode. Before I tried that my PC restarted a lot while idle. Win8 64 appears to be a little incompatible with TVservice right now.
3: I see a massive rise in recording glitches running 1.3.0b under Win8 compared to XP on the same machine. Haven't pinned down if it's an issue with the Win8 BDA system or TVservice, using different tuners and drivers has no effect. There's a systematic problem causing dropped packets, in fixed bit rate 192k radio recordings I consistently see dropped frames at 5:30min into each DVB-T recording, across all tuners.
4: you must exclude MP and especially it's log files from Windows Defender attention, otherwise MP crawls to a halt.
As a general point I've found Win8 64 considerably less stable than XP when run in desktop mode, both driver issues and I'd guess lack of interest in maintaining the desktop. Crashing Explorer is now pretty fatal, doesn't seem any way to get back from it apart from the reset button. XP usually let me safely restart when it got badly crashed.
Can't comment on whether remotes controls work and my mboard+GPU really doesn't like sleep mode so I've not tested MP.
Right now I'd avoid 64bit builds until the problems are resolved, if you have a working Win7 system there's no point. Arguably if you have a working XP HTPC only MP dropping support is a problem. Might be worth locking in the licence at the current price though, even if you don't actually install it till the 1st service pack turns up.
1: I had a lot of trouble finding drivers that would work in 64bit with 4Gb RAM enabled. The Win8 bundled drivers and downloaded updates ALL failed. I was surprised, they've had several years to get this sorted out and raises some serious questions about driver support in general and Microsofts testing regime. If building a dedicated HTPC not really a problem, just lock down to <4Gb or use a 32bit install. But I now have quite a lot of hardware that either won't work or will crash Win8 instantly.
2: MP 1.3.0.beta TVService needs running in XP SP3 compatibility mode. Before I tried that my PC restarted a lot while idle. Win8 64 appears to be a little incompatible with TVservice right now.
3: I see a massive rise in recording glitches running 1.3.0b under Win8 compared to XP on the same machine. Haven't pinned down if it's an issue with the Win8 BDA system or TVservice, using different tuners and drivers has no effect. There's a systematic problem causing dropped packets, in fixed bit rate 192k radio recordings I consistently see dropped frames at 5:30min into each DVB-T recording, across all tuners.
4: you must exclude MP and especially it's log files from Windows Defender attention, otherwise MP crawls to a halt.
As a general point I've found Win8 64 considerably less stable than XP when run in desktop mode, both driver issues and I'd guess lack of interest in maintaining the desktop. Crashing Explorer is now pretty fatal, doesn't seem any way to get back from it apart from the reset button. XP usually let me safely restart when it got badly crashed.
Can't comment on whether remotes controls work and my mboard+GPU really doesn't like sleep mode so I've not tested MP.
Right now I'd avoid 64bit builds until the problems are resolved, if you have a working Win7 system there's no point. Arguably if you have a working XP HTPC only MP dropping support is a problem. Might be worth locking in the licence at the current price though, even if you don't actually install it till the 1st service pack turns up.
Australia
If I understand things correctly madvr is a replacement for your standard renderer and it will use gpu for doing its job... but again just had a quick look and I am truly no expert in these things...