MPEG2 Issues with Lifeview TV Walker

[mobiusnz]

Just when I get one thing going I find another drops off..... soon I'll get it ALL working and STOP playing!!!

I now have Excellent Live Preview mode TV!
I have Superb Divx MPEG4 Recording
I have a util that rips TV Listing from various websites for NZ in XMLTV format!

My current Problems are

a) I can't play a recording while its still recording using DIVX

b) I can play a recording while its still recording in MPEG2 format but I get no Audio and it doesn't always play at all.

c) I get no Audio at all with MPEG2 (playing it back in PowerDVD or anything) after its recorded.

The play while recording isn't a BIG issue as already GBPVR is proving FAR easier and more convenient than our VCR (Especially since I was always too lazy to label tapes properly so could never find what I'd taped! but its the final nicety for those nights when you are 15 mins late home to watch your favorite show but you don't want to wait the extra 45 till its finished or the nights when the kids are slow getting to bed so you miss the first 5 mins!

Any tips where to start looking

[KingArgyle]

a. You can't do this because of the AVI file container. The length of the movie, and some other information isn't written in the AVI file until it is complete. If you ever notice when GBPVR is actually recording the file in DIVX format the AVI file is 0 bytes long. As soon as it completes recording you get the correct file size. Sub I believe doesn't have any control over this.

c. There is a problem with the patch that sub released to get the DIVX audio portion working. I believe he and Hitek are testing out new code that will hopefully have DIVX and MPEG2 working. I'm waiting for this as well, as I have some shows I'd like to record in MPEG2 but others I record in DIVX.

As of right now, I just record everything in DIVX format and play it on the PC later after it has finished recording.

[hitek146]

A) After some research, it seems like this might be able to be done with a plug-in, but as KingArgyle stated, it is not done easily...

B) This is corrected with the new code.

C) This is also corrected with the new code, but shouldn't have been a problem in the first place unless you are using one of the updated NativeUtilities.dll that Sub posted for the Walker. Until the new release comes out, you will just have to swap DLLs if you need to record something in MPEG2....

Hitek

[mobiusnz]

I was using a newly posted nativeutilities.dll and I couldn't even be sure which was the right one so I deleted it and ran the .msi install specifying a repair to make sure I got the original back. I then rebooted the machine to guarantee it wasn't being cached in memory and I'm still getting good divx5 avi's with sound but no sound in mpeg2.

I seem to remember the main change for the nativeuti.... was to make sure the right audio encoder was used but I've de-registered the one from windvr that someone reported gave issues.

I'm keen to switch back to mpeg2 as I want to experiment with comskip and the playback while recording would be nice too. I don't feel I'm getting much better quality with Divx and it seems to have a lot of trouble with High Motion - during taping Joey they have cut's with Traffic Scenes that seem to really mess with the recordings - It goes VERY blocky and jerky and takes a couple of seconds into a normal scene to recover. I imagine theres a slight CPU overhead with the Divx encoding as it must require some processing from the Mpeg4 stream ??? (I don't really know the difference between the various Mpeg4 standards out there - Divx XVid MSMPEG4 etc) - Not that this is a big issue as I get no more than 3% cpu usage while recording anyway.

Any other common (or not so common) causes for losing Audio in Mpeg2 recordings?

P.S - Is there a way to switch in and out of fullscreen mode while running gbpvr?

[sub]

You cant toggle fullscreen mode while video is playing, but the rest of the time you can use Alt-Enter.

PM sent about the other stuff.