Sometimes I'd like to chuck the whole lot in the garbage, screen and all ... and just go back to reading books like our ancestors.
1. EPG. In New Zealand, the EPG situation is killing me. I've tried XMLTVNZ, but although the author has kindly made this program freely available, he (presumably having a normal life to live) does not keep it up to date frequently enough to cope with all the changes made to the websites it scrapes off. Therefore, I'm constantly battling to have a full EPG of just 5 channels, thats all. 5. Tv1, Tv2, Tv3, C4 and Prime. I was using a precompiled XML file that was secretly avaiable from a nice website, but that has recently disappeared. That, too, though caused me untold problems until I figured out how to use XMLTV to reformat the source file into an XML file that GBPVR was happy with. Right now, I can only get Tv1 and TV2 on my EPG. sob, sob, sob. I'm REALLY frustrated!
2. Hauppage. These guys do not have good support. For some reason, I'm one of the unlucky ones who's PVR 150's dont work so well. on C4, the sound pops, or rather, goes dead for very short periods (like 1/4 second) periodically. some shows are worse than others, and some days/weeks are worse than others. No solution as yet, so my favourite shows, Southpark and Family Guy are a hit and miss affair as to whether the audio will be acceptable, with just the odd pop, or absolutely unlistenable.
3. Widescreen/letterbox etc. This isn't a major, I guess, but when you buy a 32" TV, you really want to use the whole thing. F7 in GBPVR just doesn't seem to be able to give me an option where the picture fits nicely into the screen - it either has black bars somewhere, or cuts off part of the picture. sigh.
4. quartz.dll Why I need to replace this file with an older version I do not know ... is it microsoft's fault, hauppages, Nvidias??? But since I've rebuilt my HTPC several times, I've had to go through this process a lot. Again, not a major, but it took WEEKS to find the problem the first time.
5. Power saving. To be honest, the problems above have prevented me from investigating deeply into why I can't seem to get power saving to work properly. But I just gave up, and let the PC run 100% of the time. I wonder how much that is costing me? Electricity is so darned expensive nowadays.
6. Burning. When I first sat down and planned my HTPC, one of the things on my list was to have to ability to burn shows I'd recorded to DVD, which seemed like such an obvious thing to have. Even my mother-in-law can do it with her off-the-shelf Panasonic hard drive+DVD writer thingy (of course, she doesn't have an EPG, but I'm starting to envy her actually)
I even tried Media Portal. Lets not even go there!
I was thinking of installing a DVB card to get Freeview ... should I just commit suicide instead?
I get no picture or sound in Live TV, display shows Quality = 100% (full green) and Strength = 0% (full black).
System:
GBPVR 1.0.16.
HVR-1600, drivers only from Hauppauge "cd 3.4d1".
Using ATSC attached to OTA antenna only, for now.
WinXP Home SP2, Java 1.5.0_13-b05.
nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, driver version 163.71.
New installation of O/S, etc., so it is a pretty clean environment.
I scanned the ATSC channels fine and found all known local OTA channels. The displayed signal strength during this initial scan varied from -7000 to +1600 (rough memory of numbers). I enabled my known HD stations and skipped the EPG. Live TV showed no image or sound but displayed the overlays as if it was tuning between stations.
I did all the following, recommended in the v1.0.16 survival guide and other posts, in the order shown:
- LivePreview (in Config) was already enabled.
- In config.xml, BDASubmitTuningRequestTwiceOnRecord was already true.
- Changed MUX from "Cyberlink" to "Microsoft DVR-MS". NO CHANGE.
- Used patched PVRX2.exe (survival post #5). NO CHANGE.
- In config.xml, changed BDADisableStatusChecks from false to true. NO CHANGE (the quality/signal strength overlay didn't show anymore, but that seems to be the point of this config line).
- Used new NativeUtilities.dll (survival post #6). NO CHANGE.
- Used new GBPVRBackendCommon.dll (survival post #7). NO CHANGE.
- Rescanned ATSC channels, found all the same channels as before. This time the displayed signal strength during the scan was zero for all channels. NO CHANGE.
- In config.xml, changed BDASubmitTuningRequestTwiceOnLivePreview from false to true. NO CHANGE.
I know I've got a good signal on the coax because I checked it with TS Reader Lite. Channel 2.1 (VHF 11) comes in at 100% strength = -7.0 dBm, 16Mbps on main stream, and gives me good screen shots. The PMT PID (48) and VPID (49) values for that stream on that channel match between TS Reader Lite and PVRX2.exe-native.log. Also, I temporarily installed Hauppauge's WinTV 6 and viewed live TV just fine (before I restored my drive image without it).
This environment plays .dvr-ms files I made with GBPVR v0.99.12(?) just fine in Windows Media Player 9.00.00.3354.
This seems to be a new twist on other posts. I appreciate any help you can offer. Logs are attached. I think I flushed them correctly before going to Live TV and tuning to channels 2.1, 2.2, then 2.1 again.
Also, this following observation may be completely irrelevant, but prior to starting this installation of WinXP, etc., I had been trying to use this HVR-1600 in QAM mode with my cable system. I finally got it to display live TV with QAM, although a few of the stations stuttered badly (cable channels 75.1, 76.1, 76.2 -- as verified by my QAM-capable TV).
I've just noticed that I seemed to be running out of HDD space a lot faster than I used to and have discovered that for all my recordings I seem to have multiple copies of the recording along with the various logo file and others generated by comskip. I don't have any transcoding enabled and this is happening to all recordings.
This issue only appears to have appeared recently after I upgraded comskip and used a different config file for NZ TV. If I disable comskip in post processing however this issue still seems to occur and comskip still seems to be running.
Any ideas? Does anybody have a comskip.ini file for NZ that does a good job of detecting ad breaks?
Hi this may be very simple but I'm a first timer and haven't even set this up yet.
I've been reading up on video cards and all seem to have a way to get the video into the PC, but none seem to be able to get it out to the TV.
Am I missing something?
I'd like to use GB-PVR to record the shows I like but play them back on the TV not the PC.
Can someone tell me if this is possible?
Thanks Bob
Hi, I was just woundering if there was a list of compatible remote controls. I'm prob. going to be getting a Hauppauge card so i doubt it will be a problem but I just wanna be safe.
Hello, as my title says, I got a Helios (MediaMVP) from ebay, it is Revision D3AM, mvpmc loads ok, but it does not see my dongle.bin.config, I have 2 other MVPs (D3A) that load and recognizes dongle.bin.config.
I checked about loading Config, and it says I "must first use a recent version of the Hauppauge server to load the Hauppauge dongle. This software combination saves the server IP address into flash memory."
My question is, does GBPVR 1.016 have the latest dongle loader which stores the ip? Or should I use Hauppauge loader?
Hi - I recently switched over to PVRx2. I can't figure out how to get the timeline status bar to appear during the recording. I used to be able to do this on gbpvr.exe by pressing the left or right remote button - but now that only displays the volume.
Any ideas on how to get this back? I tried searching but couldn't find anything on this.
I've been using GBPVR for a while and setting it to start fullscreen on my second monitor which is an NTSC TV connected to my Nvidia 7600GS card.
This has been working fine, but recently I replaced my 17" monitor for a 22" monitor which runs a resolution of 1680x1050.
Since that, GBPVR refuses to start on my TV, it always starts on my primary monitor.
Oddly enough, if I reduce my monitor resolution down to anything below its optimal resolution of 1680x1050, all is fine.
PVRX2 does start on the second monitor, but I prefer using the classis GBPVR because the lack of support for Hauppauge remote direct access and I don't like the new TV guide in live tv.
