99.12 & nova-t 500 & xcard - does it work?

[Bascombe]

Frazer, I was wondering exactly the same thing - I started out with 99.12 as it was specified as working in an article I came across specifically regarding use of the xcard. But I experienced some odd problems with loading the epg over dvb, and navigating it once it was there. i downloaded and installed all the versions up to date. The last one which seemed to have the option for selecting the xcard for playback was 1.1.5. On an additional positive, dvb-epg seems to also be working with this one. One odd thing I've found tho relates to the display of the osd. I'm using BlueMCE2 with the best colours setting, and can use the overscan adjust to get it fitting on the TV screen correctly. However, when I use the video libraray plug in, and go in to play a video from the hard disk, a couple of things can happen. Sometimes, the file will start playing without sound, and freeze up after about 30 seconds. Stopping the file, then trying it again usually gets it going. However, it seems to be the case that after playing any video file from the pc, the overscan settings get somehow lost, and I end up with the lower portion of the osd lost off the bottom of the screen. The display will stay like this until I start watching a live tv channel, after stopping that the osd is fitting properly on the screen again. Has this occurred for yourself?

And while we're on the subject of skins - which are you using? I've plunked for best colours with mce2 as it looks great (apart from the absence of any subtle colour grading on selected programmes within the tv guide), and the function delay is livable with, but if there was another skin that looked good without best colours selected, that'd be ideal.

Cheers,

Bascombe

Edit - its just occured to me, would the osd oddities described above be anything to do with using a standard skin on a 16:9 display?

[frazer]

Hello,

Thanks for the info on the newer version; might be worth updating after all, although from zehd's message it sounded as if all the changes in the newer versions were in the non-gbpvr.exe UI only.

As for the skins, I'm using just the standard one which I have altered so that the menus have just a plain blue background. This doesn't look great, but at least the XCard can handle it, unlike the normal background. I found when I enabled "best colours" everything slowed down too dramatically, so I gave up on that, and I never discovered a skin which seemed designed to work with the XCard's limited colours.

I always thought this was a pity, and was surprised that fewer people were using an XCard with GBPVR given the great picture quality you get on a CRT television. If I were building a new media centre for a CRT television, this is still the combination I would choose, despite the problems, and even with a Plasma TV I found that the Xcard's component output gave a better picture than my (admittedly four year old) graphics card's DVI output.

As for the picture size problems, with my current widescreen CRT TV and HTPC I am having no problems at all, but I used to have trouble with a previous set up. I'm afraid I can't remember exactly what I decided the reason for this was, but I believe it actually had more to do with the Hauppauge PVR MPEG encoder card I was using, which wouldn't tag its video as widescreen, even though it was. Hence I think I had to set the XCard output to 4:3, and then use the zoom on the widescreen TV to get the picture to fill the screen, which then obviously caused problems with getting the GBPVR OSD to fit over properly.

I still find on my newer TV that the "smart" picture shape control doesn't seem to work properly with the XCard, so I have to leave it on "widescreen" otherwise I lose bits of the OSD and the picture gets stretched vertically a little. Is it possible your TV is automatically changing the picture shape between different video sources? Remember that the picture settings for the XCard (i.e widescreen or 4:3) are set in the XCard's own software and not GBPVR- changing the skin format in GBPVR will not alter the XCard's output- though I presume this isn't your problem if the display is sometimes right.

As for your problem with freezing, this is something I've never seen I'm afraid.

Frazer

[Bascombe]

I'm starting to wonder if my freezing issue is down to a mess of codecs being on my pc - might be worth starting with a fresh install of everything. Completely agree re. the xcard quality, its a real shame its not got a more lively following these days. I bother the mediaportal forums occasionally to try to stir up some interest, but its definitely a lost cause. Like yourself I've found having the tv set to widescreen the best solution in the past, guess I'll just footer on with different settings to see which works the best.

Cheers,

Bascombe