PVR350 - Solid until upgrade to 99.12

[unixnut]

Hi Everybody
,
Thanks to all for a really great home entertainment system and some really good support posts here.
I've had my system running under 97.13 for about a year (XP Home SP2, Celeron 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM, 600GB disk, PVR350 (& remote) with direct playback through scart to TV).
Decided to catch up with the times and upgraded to 99.12. My own fault
Issues I have are:
1) Any avi vids recorded elsewhere no longer work - request play and screen goes black. mpegs recorded by gbpvr work perfectly. All worked before.
2) No sound on any youtube video.
3) When I use the TV remote to change volume on the TV the gbpvr status icons appear on screen (volume, program blurb & how far I'm through the recording).
I saw a post about running Re-Registerfilters.bat but it's made no difference.

The only thing I saw that looked untoward is the reference to the cyberlink muxer in the GPPVR.exe-native.log ....

2007-06-06 23:07:13.015 VERBOSE height: 640 width: 520
2007-06-06 23:07:13.015 VERBOSE DirectShowHelperPVR350::ShowImageUsingPVR350()
2007-06-06 23:07:13.062 VERBOSE DirectShowHelperPVR350::ShowImageUsingPVR350() complete
2007-06-06 23:07:15.312 VERBOSE FindFilterByName failed to locate filter: CyberLink MPEG Muxer
2007-06-06 23:07:15.593 VERBOSE NativeUtilities:etMenuImage()
2007-06-06 23:07:15.593 VERBOSE DirectShowHelperPVR350:etTransparency(255)
2007-06-06 23:07:15.609 VERBOSE height: 640 width: 520
2007-06-06 23:07:15.609 VERBOSE DirectShowHelperPVR350::ShowImageUsingPVR350()
2007-06-06 23:07:15.656 VERBOSE DirectShowHelperPVR350::ShowImageUsingPVR350() complete

The muxer is still where it was.
I never managed to get sound out to anywhere for net radio before the upgrade so the youtube thing may be related to that.
Anyone have any ideas how to progress ?

[sub]

Sorry to sounds negative, but to be honest I'm not surprised new stuff doesnt work with the PVR350 tv out. I drop support for it nearly two years ago, and havnt tested anything on it since then.

1) Any avi vids recorded elsewhere no longer work - request play and screen goes black. mpegs recorded by gbpvr work perfectly. All worked before.

I'm not really sure, but you could try setting the following in config.xml:

<PVR350TranscodeCmdLine>-y -b 2200k -vcodec mpeg2video -i {SOURCE_FILE} {DEST_FILE}</PVR350TranscodeCmdLine>

2) No sound on any youtube video.

By default GB-PVR uses MP3 audio with youtube videos. This is incompatible with the PVR350 tv out, which only supports MPEG1 Layer 2 audio. You should be able to fix it by fiddling the <YouTubeFFmpegTranscodeCmdLine> setting in config.xml.

2007-06-06 23:07:15.312 VERBOSE FindFilterByName failed to locate filter: CyberLink MPEG Muxer

Sounds like you dont have that mux filter registered. MuxChecker would tell you. That said, I dont think it actually needs it in any of the scenarios you mentioned. It check whether it is installed when you visit the Video Library, but only needs it if you try to use the 'transcode' button to convert a .dvr-ms file to some other type.

I never managed to get sound out to anywhere for net radio before the upgrade so the youtube thing may be related to that.

The PVR350 can only view MPEG1 and MPEG2 video files. It cant play any other type of file, including audio files. Some people get around this by hooking the PVR350 tv out audio to the soundcard line-in, then connect the soundcard line-out to the tv. This way both audio and video files produce audio.

[unixnut]

Hi Sub,

Thanks for the fast response. I got the feeling about the dropping of 350 support for playback after reading a load of posts. Oh well.

I checked and I already had the config.xml line:
<PVR350TranscodeCmdLine>-y -b 2200k -vcodec mpeg2video -i {SOURCE_FILE} {DEST_FILE}</PVR350TranscodeCmdLine>
And I wasn't transcoding anyway - as you guessed.

So it seems I have 2 choices ...
1) Put the devnz directory back as I found it (if I stop the recording service and swap the dirs back will that work?). Then use the old software without updates.
2) Try and find the TV out cable for this Geforce2 card I had kicking around and reconfig playback for that.

Again - thanks for explaining the 350 audio formats and for a real fast response.

[unixnut]

OK so the TV out card I had was for DVD playback only. Back to the old code then...
Stopped the recording service, copied the gbpvr dir to one side and copied in the safe old revision. When I started GBPVR or the config tool it jumped straight into an upgrade, which screwed it up again. Darn.
Fortunately I still had the 97.13 msi installer package so I moved the gbpvr dir to one side again, ran the installer and when it finished copied the safe 97.13 dir back over the top in order to preserve my channel mappings etc
All back and running.
One outstanding item left.... I had a lot of failed recordings that I couldn't delete through the interface. That issue was fixed with 99.12 (earlier too I believe). However the config.xml setting to delete missing recordings was set to true and wasn't working. If you're squemish don't read the next bit..... I manually removed the lines from the gbpvr.mdb using the free tool PrjMDB.exe and all appears well. If there's a better way please tell me