Set top GBPVR client machine project

[Koenie]

I ordered an ATI 780 chipset board to make a set-top client too. The machine is supposed to run of a CF card (4GB) as well.

As I have to wait for the mobo to be delivered i started with an old machine, (duron 1300 Nvidia 6200 512 mb ram) installed XP after chopping out as much as possible with nlite and installed and updated it on a hard drive. The I installed the EWF filter (as mentioned earlier in this treat) and copied everything over to an old 1GB CF card. Windows runs quite well and at least for the short test stable with writes to the card = 0.
As the card is too small for .net 2.0, 3.0 and GBPVR I went back to the hard disk and installed the .net's and GBPVR. reenabled the EWF filter and am now running the test further from the hard drive with GBPVR running as a client. Works stable for a few days now. The full install is 2.6 GB so fits nicely on a 4GB CF later.

The only issue I have is the slow loading of the recordings of tv guide screen but that is also the case on another client and might be due to the wireless network or even typical for client situation - have to research that a bit further - .

When I get the mobo I will post my findings in its own treat.

[gazoo]

Thanks. I'm going to give it another try when I get everything running on the hard disk and pare it down a bit and then clone it to the CF card. For now, I'm running of the hard disk to avoid anymore slowdowns and nightmares.

[86atc250r]

In my experience, running a slow system drive on xp is a painful experience, even if your apps are on a fast drive. You'd think once loaded it would be fine, but overall system performance really seems to suffer badly.

With that experience, I would think that trying to run XP on a CF bridge would be extremely painful & performance for use with GBPVR would leave a lot to be desired.

A laptop drive would probably work nicely if you're goal is to keep power use low, small size, low noise & heat. You still have the moving parts/failure element, but that's going to be difficult at this point to get away from without going to an expensive SSD or a DDR drive like one of the old Gigabyte I-RAM setups --- that would actually be fairly attractive solution if there were a version that would run DDR2 or if you had a bunch of DDR laying around.

[gazoo]

Ok, system seems more stabilized and I have pvrx2 and plugins installed. The system did NOT like cybervideo codec at all. It was using both cores and stuttering hardcore on HD sources when using pvrx2. So I used ffdshow as the mpeg codec as does by default on wmp11. It worked smoothly with the following CPU usage:

1080i .dvr-ms on WMP11 core 1 0%, core 2 55%
SD mpeg on WMP11 core 1 0%, core 2 5%
1080p .m2t file core 1 0%, core 2 60%

The funny thing is that I believed cybervideo codec to be the top notch codec. On the server, it's the only one that can play all the HD and SD files smoothly. Also, I have no way of knowing what ffdshow is really using (maybe someone can help me find out - and no, graphedit just shows "ffdshow" big help.) I thought that ffdshow is a wrapper type program that calls others in for help - let me know if that's a wrong assumption.

I'm gonna try some of the other codecs that pop up in the gbpvr config tool and see if things change.

I was also curious if these numbers sound a bit high considering all the hype this motherboard chipset has received.

Some other observations about this motherboard:
1) There's a high pitched whine (like an old tv set) that pulsates to the ethernet flashes/network activity. It's real annoying, especially with the cover open. I think it is high voltage through the capacitors or something..not cool, it's pretty loud, louder than the hard drive.

2) No wake on lan that I could find. The ethernet doesn't blink when the case is off and there's no WOL options on the motherboard. Some do ever use this option but I use it frequently.

3) Runs REAL cool. I haven't stress tested it, but it's cool.

[Deusxmachina]

To see what FFdshow is using, just open it and click on Codecs to see the list of every type of file and what is associated with it. Probably libavcodec for most stuff.

[pBS]

try using the ati decoder for that gpu...should work nicely..
i get about 15% cpu with HD when using it on my HD3450 card with EVR..

[gazoo]

is that the avivo decoder? there's something called mpeg decoder on the gbpvr menu but i don't think that's it. where do i get it?

[pBS]

came with the video card/MB in your case...
it is the avivo codec, but in gbpvr it's called "ATI MPEG Video Decoder"
you may have to download the avivo package if it's not already installed with video driver..[it is available seperately on website]
tho it should be on the MB cd..

if you can find atidvcr.dll on your system that's it..
you may have to add it into config.xml as supported decoder if it's not already in there..

[gazoo]

I had to download it. The system didn't like this either. There's something extremely screwed up when I run in vmr9 - only certain codecs play well. I'm also having quartz.dll like issues - although it's probably not that considering I've patched it to hell (new quartz, hotfixes, cpu affinity patches,etc.)

I've got a suppot thread open about it.

[wtg]

I don't know about your motherboard, video chipset, etc, but I can tell you even the latest MS patches don't fix all the quartz.dll issues for everyone.

I noticed stuttering after skipping very recently (not just in HD but SD content too) and after downgrading back to the 9.0b version of quartz.dll, it went away.