nVidia Settings Suggestions

[smajor]

Thanks all, I spent some serious time looking into this the past 24 hours, here are the things that seemed to make things a little better for me:

- turning down the acceleration on the video card a couple of notches..
- going to the Dscaler decoders.
- using the GBPVR patch from another thread concerning choppy video.

I've also found the the built-in SoundMax audio card drivers suck. Reverting to generic Windows XP sound drivers helped quite a lot - I was having some audio/video sync issues that just vanished when I did this.

The posts about reverting to the older nVidia drivers is a great idea - I rebuilt this box from scratch a couple of weeks ago and installed the latest drivers for everything, that's about when my problems started. If I still have problems, that's my next step in troubleshooting.

For those wondering, this is one of two GB-PVR setups I have and it has older hardware than the other:

Gateway e4100
-1GB DDR RAM (PC2700 Paired 512MB modules))
-GeForce MX4000 card (using S-Video out)
-2.4GHz Processor
-ATA133 160GB HD
-Hauppauge PVR USB2
-WinXP Professional

[ShiningDragon]

Have you tried the new 93.71 WHQL? In my case it's the first since 84.25 which runs well again with my OnBoard 6150.

[csy]

IMO, you are really pushing the boundaries to get smooth video out of a MX-series video card, but here are some pointers.

1) MX doesn't support MPEG2 hardware acceleration so make sure that function is disabled in the decoder config
2) MX is not powerful enough to support VMR, so ensure GBPVR is configured to Overlay (same applies to decoder if configurable)
3) Set display resolution to 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL) so that the video card does not have to perform any hardware scaling
4) 'default' the TV-out zoom so the video card does not have to perform hardware scaling
5) Edit GBPVR's config.xml and ensure horizontal and vertical zoom are set to zero, and 'OverscanVideoAlso' to false. Again this is so the video card does not have to perform hardware scaling.
6) Set TV as 'primary' display in the video driver config

[frankmcg]

Have you tried the new 93.71 WHQL? In my case it's the first since 84.25 which runs well again with my OnBoard 6150.

Interested to hear more on this. I'm still on the previous version 92.xx? on my 6150 and things seem to be running OK. Any particular improvements of note? I'm obviously hesitant to tinker just when things seem to be working!

[nitrogen_widget]

Thanks all, I spent some serious time looking into this the past 24 hours, here are the things that seemed to make things a little better for me:

- turning down the acceleration on the video card a couple of notches..
- going to the Dscaler decoders.
- using the GBPVR patch from another thread concerning choppy video.

I've also found the the built-in SoundMax audio card drivers suck. Reverting to generic Windows XP sound drivers helped quite a lot - I was having some audio/video sync issues that just vanished when I did this.

The posts about reverting to the older nVidia drivers is a great idea - I rebuilt this box from scratch a couple of weeks ago and installed the latest drivers for everything, that's about when my problems started. If I still have problems, that's my next step in troubleshooting.

For those wondering, this is one of two GB-PVR setups I have and it has older hardware than the other:

Gateway e4100
-1GB DDR RAM (PC2700 Paired 512MB modules))
-GeForce MX4000 card (using S-Video out)
-2.4GHz Processor
-ATA133 160GB HD
-Hauppauge PVR USB2
-WinXP Professional

Is the stuttering with live TV or playback?
Or both?

[nitrogen_widget]

Have you tried the new 93.71 WHQL? In my case it's the first since 84.25 which runs well again with my OnBoard 6150.

The latest drivers booted me to a blank screen on my pci 6200.

[smajor]

Is the stuttering with live TV or playback?
Or both?

It was just LiveTV and it wasn't constant. At random times the video would start to break up, along with audio stuttering, getting worse and worse until LiveTV froze.

Again, completely random - it would sometimes do this right away after a reboot or work fine for 6-8 hours.

All other GB-PVR goodies would work fine (DVD, Recordings, etc.), except LiveTV.

Each time it did this, in troubleshooting, I found a couple of things:

1. I could exit GB-PVR and open WinTV and Live TV was just fine (which seemed told me my tuner hardware was okay-not overheating or failing.)
2. If I exited GB-PVR, killed the recording service, and started again LiveTV would be fine.

[nitrogen_widget]

It almost sounds like something is running in the background eating up resources.
Can you pull up the task manager when it happens to see where your ram & cpu cycles are going?

[smajor]

It almost sounds like something is running in the background eating up resources.
Can you pull up the task manager when it happens to see where your ram & cpu cycles are going?

Good idea, I should have thought of that! If it does happen again, I'll do that.

I haven't had problems since I made the above adjustments, so hopefully it's smooth sailing.