An early HD TV. Projection, not one of these fancy plasma things kids today have. Projection! Will never hang from a wall! It will do 480 and 1080, but not 720, for reasons I don't pretend to understand.
The shape of said TV is 4x3 - NOT a widescreen.
PC video card is an ATI HD 2600. The only 1080 option that Catalyst Control Centre offers is 1920x1080. If there is a way for it to go with a 4x3 (1440x1080 I guess), I've been unable to find it.
The two work well enough, except, of course GBPVR shows up widescreen letterboxed, with black bars top and bottom. Not at all unexpected, since the desktop resolution is 16x9.
Which is fine. Not perfect, but fine.
The challenge comes when watching a 4x3 video, since now the various parts want to conspire to put but black bars at the top, AND black bars on both left and right sides to bring the display back to 4x3. So now, on the 4x3 television, I'm watching a 4x3 video in a little box with roughly a third of the screen around all edges.
Which is just silly.
But none of my proddings have been able to find a solution. Thus, my appeal to the rest of the readers here.
First - the TV shape in config. Do I set it to 4x3 (the physical shape), or 16x9 (the desktop resolution forced upon it)?
Second - the Aspect Ratio Modes in config.xml. I don't see how fiddling with these can help, but I'd like to be sure.
Third - Does (can?) GBPVR change the desktop resolution to 480 on playing a video? (Or, alternately, start at 480, then switch to 1080 if necessary). Or is it fixed to the desktop resolution at startup?
Fourth! - Anybody aware of any tricks to get CCC to give me 1440x1080?
Output from the video to the TV is through the "svideo" connector on the card that splits to a component video cable (red, blue, green) and then to the TV.
Sorry, nope, no DVI / HDMI on the TV. Component only. Did I mention it's a bit... advanced in years ?
Any comments / suggestions are very much welcomed and most appreciated. Thanks!
I've attempted to do a short (one minute) manual test recording with the BDA Multiplexer selected to "Microsof DVR-MS" and have failed to get a successful result. After the recording is done, TWO files are created with the DVR-MS extension and are only 6 KB in size. Neither file will play in XP Windows Media Player 11. I have had success in creating TS test files that play back in the Windows 7 Media Player, but they will not play in the XP version. So I need help with 1 or 2:
1) Create recordings in the DVR-MS format or
2) Get the TS files to play in Windows Media Player 11 for XP.
I also have not been able to get the "Auto-Convert TS recordings to MPEG-2" to work, but I'll address that issue in another thread if necessary.
My goal is to have gbpvr installed on an XP server to record TV for playback on a XP Windows Media Player.
Notes:
gbpvr version 1.4.7
Windows XP Pro, service pack 3
HDHomeRun versiion 20100213
Thanks for your valuable time and for supporting a wonderful product!
Hello All,
I think I already know the answer to my question, but want to see if perhaps I'm wrong.
Do I have to scan in all the channels on each of the two tuners treating them as completely separate capture devices? If so, do I really have to scan in all the channels again? And how is it going to work with the programming / tvguide? Am I now going to have doubles of each channel shown? Or Only one copy and the software knows it now has two choices of tuner? Or is all this completely wrong, and I need to do this differently? I couldn't find anything that talked about the subject of the second tuner.
What is the best way to do the install for the second tuner?
Also I ended up using the Hdhomerun scan tool when I scanned in the first tuner. Worked like a charm for the Web based channelguide. But when using the LiveTv feature guide information is missing for some channels. The web based programming guide shows everything. Is there a fix for this? Does it have to do with the naming of channels? If I rename them will it effect the web based program?
Not sure if I should put this in support. I am wondering if anyone has been able to get the combination of a server/client system and also use comskip effectively for ASTC. My experience is that I can't do both. I have to use the dvr-ms mux to get comskip to work, but that does not work with a client/server system. Anyone have any thoughts/solutions?
I'm having a hard time figuring out how to use winlirc to do Ir blasting. I have a Directv STB. I found a file online that has raw codes in it but when I try to use the file as my configuration file, I get an error saying that it only works in raw mode. Does anybody have a .cf file for a Directv receiver that works? I need to be able to change channels so it would help me out a lot!
I'm posting the XBMC-scripts that I have been working on for the last few months. I've been developing a set of scripts that you can install under XBMC and will allow XBMC to act as a front-end to GBPVR.
It will work on both Windows-based XBMC and Linux-based XBMC installations (this is what allowed me to get one of those nice Atom nettops).
I have chosen to use file-based exporting from GBPVR (to minimize potential problems), and the scripts will allow you to control your GBPVR server (look at the EPG, schedule / cancel recordings, search the EPG, resolve conflicts etc.) A C# executable (with source) is available to export files to XBMC in the correct manner (so epg-metadata is shown in XBMC).
It's based on a few things:
EWA (special thanks to UncleJohnsBand for his patience and support), you will need build 83 (released recently) for things to work okay
Further I have shamelessly copied code from the MythBox and myTV plugins...
You'll need to install PyCrypto (a cryptographic library for Python) to make things work.
I have attached a few images below to show you how things look....
There's a "Readme.txt" file in the zip, which shows you how to install the script on your XBMC system....
I have to restart PVRX2 whenever I want to use my bluetooth headphones to redirect the audio from my receiver to the headphones and similarly restart again when I am done with the headphones. I wish my HTPC would just auto-magically redirect audio whenever I turn the bluetooth headphones on or off. I know this is not a GBPVR specific issue, but I was not sure where on the net to look for a solution, any suggestions? I am using the BlueSoleil bluetooth software btw.
You requested that I start a new thread in this forum and include a copy of my logs. The original post was:
[INDENT] In the past I had been using an HP Proliant ML150 as my main server, which included GbPvr recording and hosting two PCH's as clients. It definitely was up to the task, but used around 250 to 300watts at idle. So I started searching for a greener solution. First, for storage, I got a NAS from Qnap (Ts-410) which uses only about 20 watts with three 1.5 TB disks in it. Then for the heck of it, I temporarily tried to use my Dell Vostro A90 (Atom 1.6, identical to the Dell Mini 9) to act as a GbPvr server. To my surprise, it worked perfectly for recording shows. However, it is not up to the task of streaming video to the NMT. So now I am thinking about building a system based on the Zotac IONITX motherboard (which has a dual core Atom processoor) so I can get my Vostro back...
[/INDENT]
I deleted all logs, then restarted GbPvr and tried to stream a recording to my PCH (A110). I have attached the logs. It does look like it's getting some errors at the end. Sometimes the playback stutters, sometimes it loses sound, sometimes appears to fast forward. I did check the CPU usage on the Vostro and you were right, it never got above 30% while steaming. I should mention that playing the recordings directly from the PCH works fine.
In the other thread, you mentioned:
[INDENT]Normally GBPVR streams to the PCH via http but the --use-shares option cause the file to be read via cifs/smb In theory you don't lose com skip, but many NAS devices don't have the oomph to support streaming required be mvpmcx2. It might be worth a try. [/INDENT]
If you tell me how to invoke the --use-shares option I will try this out. Does it go in the MVP section of config.xml or is it a command line option to mvpmcx2?
maybe this doesn't affect too many people, but I've setup a dual-boot to run GBPVR on XP SP3.. and the partition for XP is labeled H:.
most things work fine so far, but some of the logs for GBPVR get written to C:\Program Files\devnz\GBPVR\logs , rather than in H:\. Maybe some errant hardcoding somewhere?
just thought I'd run it by you in case other similar things pop up for folks in the future.
