I just wanted to post incase anyone was thinking about getting one of these. I decided to take the plunge and see if this would be a decent client, i am stressing client here as i have done no other testing of it and do not plan to set it up as a server.
First impressions, i was actually completely amazed at how responsive the single core processor was. I did not feel at all like it was a sluggish computer, and the one i got is running XP. It uninstalled all the crapware and installed all the software to get up an running as a GBPVR client pretty quickly.
Some have mentioned on the internet to upgrade ram and change video settings in bios. I found that one gig and the auto settings that were already set in the bios have worked fine for me so no need for that second gig. (now i am not saying there would be no benefit to the second gig, but for my needs as a strickly GBPVR client playing mostly mpeg2 video it does not seem necessary)
My testing:
I am in the US, and record TV through clear QAM using .ts, I record mostly HDTV locals and some other SD channels. I also have a fair collection of DVD's encoded in H.264. The codecs i am using for playback are mpeg2 = cyberlink pdvd (i installed the SAF pack and have both 8 and 9 and they perform the same for this) AC3 sound i use FFdshow, i had some issues when using the mpc hc sound codec, so stuck with FFDshow and its working great. I am using MPC-HC h.264 codec for all my H.264 encodings. I havent had time to extensively test yet, as i havent got many new recodings on the server, but in the limited ones, a mixture of HD and SD, all have play as they should, no stuttering, and the pic looks great, i even think it looks better than my onboard ati client.
My experience has been pretty good overall, i am using a MCE remote and found a way to install the drivers on XP home and its working fine. I have not been able to get the HDMI audio working, i tried on both my TV's and this may be due to drivers, but at the moment i HDMI video and audio coming out of the headphone jack, which is a minor annoyance but can live with it for now.
My H.264 video plays fine no issues there, and gbpvr overall is responsive.
So far my experience is great and will continue to post after tesinting it further next week.
Thats it for now folks check back next week. Feel free to post questions i might be able to help answer them
I'm using MVPMC on my MVPs (autoloaded from GBPVR) and every time I have to do a cold boot on any of my MVPs I have to get into MVPMC setup to change the screen resolution to 16:9 (all my TVs are wide screen).
Is there anyway to set the MVPMC default to 16:9 instead of 4:3?
Clearly setting up a computer based PVR/TV application isn't the easiest thing to do. Any of us that have had to set up our own GBPVR box know what a headache it is to get running and running well. It includes tweaking codecs, gbpvr and even the operating system itself.
Could we make life easier by packaging Windows Embedded as gbpvr version that strips all but the necessary functionality of Windows out and provide a much more stable, faster platform for GBPVR? It's $90 per license. Yes, it would be tricky from a licensing standpoint since this is meant for hardware mftrs. Perhaps this is a way for sub to make some $$$ off of gbpvr by providing a Windows Embedded version that the end user could install quickly on their hardware.
Probably far fetched but I thought I would throw that out there to see if it might trigger some innovative thinking.
Hi All,
I an new here and I want to say thank you to those who created this and support this project, and plugins.
This is not my first try at building a media center, I have tried others and I am a Linux guy so I started with LinuxMCE. The hard ware I have did not work. I tried some other Linux MCEs but no go. I then went back to windows tried a few but this is the best one, and it works!!!
My MCE I have just built out a pile of junk.
IBM Think center desktop 1.8gb hyper thread 1.5gb ram 500gb HD.
Windows XP pro networked via wire.
ATI 9600 pro 128mb video.
Win PVR 150 TV card, with remote.
Sound Blaster Live Value card.
Wireless key board with roller mouse built in.
Every thing is working very well, but I have 2 issues (small ones).
I have a slight buzzing sound from the audio out. I think I can fix this with a USB sound card. Next my TV listing is 3 hours off. I built the system set the time zone, but after I installed SP3 it went back to PST and I did not see that till after I set up the hole thing.
I read that some one did this and they removed all the xmltv data, and removed the capture card. Re-added this back and that fixed the issue. I did this but no go. I even tried the offset under settings for the xmltv plugin, but that did not work.
I am wondering if I uninstall the GB PVR software and delete the dir form the PC reinstall would this fix the issue?
I would also like to change the skin background photo, how can I do this?
Going thorugh the Wishlist section and having seen what recent upgrades to GBPVR have added, it got me wondering what the original release of GBPVR was like.
Are there any screen caps available so we can see this bit of history?
I download the complete schedule of 14 days worth of program EPG every night and generally when I learn of a program that will be coming up I schedule it as soon as I find out about it. This is frequently more than a week before the scheduled air date.
One very frustrating thing about GBPVR is that once a program is scheduled to be recorded in a time slot, even if subsequent EPG updates would find that the program is no longer scheduled at that time or the particular episode has changed, it doesn't get corrected.
This just happened to me again yesterday when a program showed up in the EPG at a particular time and many days in advance I scheduled it to be recorded. This got changed in subsequent days that the program was replaced by a completely different one but that time slot got recorded and was identified as the incorrect program anyways.
It's my understanding that once a program is scheduled in GBPVR then that time slot no longer updated by subsequent EPG downloads.
Right now, fixing this would be the NUMBER ONE item on my wish list.
I'm in the process of updating to the newest version of GBPVR on a different PC. I want to import TV shows recorded with GBPVR version 1.0.12 to the TV recordings folders created in version 1.4.7? Can I just copy/paste the shows into their respective folders?
Is anyone else here using comclean dvr to process dvr-ms files? I have been trying and it isn't working well at all. Comskip finds all the commercials and flags them all properly but comclean dvr will remove more than just the tagged commercials. I recorded a football game and all the tags were right but after running comclean dvr it left out the entire third quarter.
Just wondering if anyone has messed with this yet.
From time to time, Google.com/movies doesn't offer all of my nearby cinemas. Would it be possible if it doesn't find one cinema that it will not delete the cinema and all the data? Much like the trailers and posters are retained for X amount of days?
There seems to be a limited number of buttons on the MCE remote control. How do you advance and retreat a page at a time in the guide? I have over 130 channels in my lineup and it takes a long time to get through it going up or down one line at a time.
