ASUS My Cinema 7131 Dual

[wannabepvr]

A friend on mine has one of these P7131 cards. He had tried MythTV MCE and the bundled software with little success.

Using the direct.ini and bda.ini additons above I have been able to get the (BDA) digital side of the card working in live preview mode and recording. So thanks to "lulugt6"

The signal strength is reports is very low and I still can't get any signal on a few channels but I am still working on that.

I see there is some question about the analogue side.

Yes the device has a hardware MPEG decoder for the analog side (according to the specs: "Advanced Phillips Video/Audio decoder with two-bit video analogue-to-digital converter"

I think while this means the card has a A-D converter it does not imply any sort of hardware compression. In fact given the minimum spec of a P4 2.6 I think this actually implies on-the-fly software compression (yuk)

I read Sub is pretty pessimistic about the analogue side - but just to be clear has anyone got it to work?

[preinke]

I've had running for some weeks a single Asus MyCinema P7131 Dual under Windows XP and the latest versions of GB-PVR. This is in Sydney Australia if it matters.

To get it working initially I had to update the BDA.INI with the details suppied earlier in this thread (thanks Lulugt6).

Now I'm looking for assistance/suggestions as to how to get this working with two or more cards?

I add the new card as per normal but it doesn't seem to be able to pick up the channels. I've tried changing the Device Number without sucess.

Paul

[inspector71]

Hi from Melbourne Australia. I have had the most atrocious experiences with digital TV cards over the last several years that I have gone bananas. I went to the local swap meet and bought not one but another two cards! My theory is I'm hoping I'll get at least one working. Initially I'm trying the ASUS and things were looking good. Not sure if that is still the case. Sure the drivers and Cyberlink PowerCinema software worked well enough initially but they only picked up half the channels and performance is sporadically choppy as well.

Turning to GB-PVR I'm very impressed by how GB-PVR has improved in general quality since the last time I played with it. I was even more amazed to see the ASUS (which I expected to be relatively obscure) supported. However seems the ASUS was/is only half supported since the BDA.ini file had the settings referred to in this thread, but the direct.ini file did not.

Nevertheless the strangest thing happened -> the digital part of the card picked up almost all channels without trouble and played them rather smoothly. Then something went kerplunk. I don't know what. Now I get the black screen described by _age_ (is this the mysterious black.mpg in the gbpvr folder?).

Now I've added the direct.ini section mentioned in this thread and have scanned all the digital channels again (don't care about analogue right now) and let's see if it works then dies later.

----------

Damn, I've still got nothing but a black screen.

How can the scanning go so well but then everything dies when I try to view TV in the application?

[sub]

Nevertheless the strangest thing happened -> the digital part of the card picked up almost all channels without trouble and played them rather smoothly. Then something went kerplunk. I don't know what.

What video decoder do you have selected in the config app playback tab? Dont use system default. If you dont have any others listed, then you may not have a decoder installed - which woudl give you a black screen.

Reproduce the problem, then zip and attach the logs and I'll take a look.

[preinke]

Inspector71, In the end I've got my cards working, so will help where-ever I can (but I'll leave the reading of logs to the experts - thanks Sub).

Let me know what assistance or details I can provide to assist.

Paul

[inspector71]

What video decoder do you have selected in the config app playback tab? Dont use system default. If you dont have any others listed, then you may not have a decoder installed - which woudl give you a black screen.

Hi Sub, thanks for your reply.

I may have screwed myself around. I was hoping to use the KISS principle and get the card working with just the drivers and GB-PVR. Hence I cleaned out all the Cyberlink ware that came with the card. This means I only have the following options:

Video Decoder:
"System Default"
"ffdshow MPEG-4 Video Decoder"

Audio Decoder:
"System Default"
"MPEG Audio Decoder"

Audio Renderer:
"System Default"
"Realtek HD Audio ouput"
"Default DirectSound Device"
"Default WaveOut Device"
"DirectSound: Realtek HD Audio o ..."

Setting the Video Decoder to "ffdshow MPEG-4 Video Decoder" doesn't work. I take it this is because ffdshow just controls other codecs but isn't a codec itself?

Reproduce the problem, then zip and attach the logs and I'll take a look.

Thanks that would be super. I'll kill off everything and start again so you don't get logs full of crap.

[inspector71]

Let me know what assistance or details I can provide to assist.
Paul

Thanks Paul, I really appreciate your offer. When the big hardware manufacturers don't provide adequate software and support, fellows users like yourself are all us poor sods have to turn to

[inspector71]

Well, I tried re-installing the Cyberlink bundle and despite the Cyberlink PowerCinema software behaving exactly as before (receiving limited channels and playing back but with some choppiness) as well as GB-PVR picking up the channels no problems, no viewing of TV is possible.

I set the Playback -> Software MPEG-2 Playback settings all to Cyberlink, specifically:

CyberLink Video/SP Decoder
CyberLink Audio Decoder
CyberLink Audio Renderer(PCM4)

The only thing I didn't do is add the entries suggested in this forum to direct.ini

Sub I've attached a zip of the entire logs directory. If you could take a look I'd greatly appreciate it.

[inspector71]

What video decoder do you have selected in the config app playback tab? Dont use system default. If you dont have any others listed, then you may not have a decoder installed - which woudl give you a black screen.

Reproduce the problem, then zip and attach the logs and I'll take a look.

Hi Sub, how was your short holiday? Good I hope.

Any luck with the logs I attached? Sorry to hassle you just that I would like to refine my system by yanking the card out soon. If I can help the community by debugging support for this card before I give it the rear, I'd be happy to, if you don't have time to debug, fair enough