PC viable option for Freesat in the UK?

[Dava]

Hi Pob,
you're right, you can get BBC HD on a nova-s-plus.

Nova s2 can be found on amazon for £67

Or if you are happy with a bit of pain then go for the S350 at £25 it currently receives the BBC and ITV channels fine after editing the scan cache.

I am having playback issues at the moment in XP with the new HTPC but it does look fantastic under my Vista partition.. I just wish I could get the bits that work in Vista well working in XP or vice versa...

[BigMoose]

What problems are you having in XP and Vista? I've run both but have kept Vista64 now (got roughly the same results with vista32 and 64) although I've not 100% solved everything, it's pretty sodding good

[Dava]

I am getting close with XP as that is where I have focussed at the moment but with Vista32, I cannot:

Get the ATI TV tool to correctly set the capture volume on my ATI550 causing clipping of the sound.
Cannot get certain old Games to work at all, even in compatibility mode.
Routinely got a "No signal" warning on the S350

So I called it a day and went to XP but now I have these issues:

Cannot get H264 to decode with anything other than Cyberlink 8, MPCVideodec.ax just gives a blank screen.
ATI550 image gradually degrades with colourful blocks of corruption in the MPEG stream. Fine for 5 mins then gradually unwatchable (works fine in Vista)
EVR shows slight tearing which seems fine in Vista. VMR9 FSE would occasionally freeze the machine totally!
Cannot reorder my cap sources as I would like to avoid ATI issue as if I put the 550 in the middle, the config app forgets it and puts it back at the top!


There are just toooooo many variables for me to work out at the pace that I would like. This was a clean install of XP but now it feels dirty and sullied

I may just have to start again..... good old "shrink volume"

[sub]

Cannot reorder my cap sources as I would like to avoid ATI issue as if I put the 550 in the middle, the config app forgets it and puts it back at the top!

I see the occasional report of this. I'm not sure why it happens, but to fix you need to use a tool like SQLiteSpy to execute the following SQL:

Code:

update CAPTURE_SOURCE set allocation_order=oid

After this it should behave correctly.

[Dava]

Code:

update CAPTURE_SOURCE set allocation_order=oid

After this it should behave correctly.[/QUOTE]

And indeed it does! Thanks Sub.

[Pob]

Cannot get H264 to decode with anything other than Cyberlink 8, MPCVideodec.ax just gives a blank screen.

I had the same issue with MPVVideoDec recently - it has been working extremely well until I installed Oggcodecs from Illiminable - then I just got a blank screen playing an MKV file. Uninstalled oggcodecs and eveything back to normal. Just goes to show how codecs don't always co-exist very well.
Using the MPC decoder I get <10% cpu playing 720p or 1080p! (and no tearing so long as VMR9 FSE is used).

[Pob]

There are new (28 June 2008) MPC files available at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles..._id=170561
But they did not work for me at all...would like to know if anyone else can get them to play ball.
I unregistered the existing MPCVideoDec.ax and Mpeg2DecFilter.ax, replaced the files then registered them...But they would not play any H264 files. The only way I got the new decoder to work was to first disable DXVA acceleration in the decoder filter properties - which rather defeats the object of using them!