Working fine until suddenly no onscreen stuff

[sub]

Ok, so at first I thought yeah I had already gone through that link for reinstalling DirectX, but in fact it was only the web installation that it had done, which didn't actually take place since it said the files were already there. I redid it with the full installer. After that, rebooted and tried NPVR playback again - same result no OSD.

Tried going to a lower screen resolution. That seems to have done the trick. I was originally at 1024x768. Went to lower resolution one step at a time and had no OSD until I got to 800x600. At this setting, I get the OSD, yay! Strange that I had the OSD before though. Font size is a bit BIG at this resolution, but I can live with that.

This tells us it is to do with your video card or it's drivers.

If it used to work at that original resolution, something must have changed about your configuration, like version of driver, or directx or something, and the video card is no longer able to allocate an OSD layer when running at a high resolution.

[sub]

Edit: Lowering the resolution and getting OSD indicates lack of video memory, as I suspected.

Yep

[Legacy14]

Thanks guys, at least we got to the bottom of it. I'll explore further into DirectX and the video card.

Reddwarf, I know what you mean about the people on Time Team. They spend a lot of time kneeling or crouching on the ground, and the cameramen sometimes point the cameras in "interesting" places.

[Reddwarf]

thanks guys, at least we got to the bottom of it. I'll explore further into directx and the video card.

Reddwarf, i know what you mean about the people on time team. They spend a lot of time kneeling or crouching on the ground, and the cameramen sometimes point the cameras in "interesting" places. :d

Right

[jcjefferies]

A 1920 X 1080 resolution display needs 64MB of video RAM but NextPVR uses some for the OSD hence the 128MB minimum spec for NextPVR. I found this out several years ago when using an old computer with 64MB of video RAM. It worked ok on a 1360 X 780 display but no OSD when used on 1920 X 1080 display. As your video card is supposed to have 128MB it would suggest it may have lost some memory as your 1024 X 768 would only use just over 25MB video RAM.

Chris

[Legacy14]

A 1920 X 1080 resolution display needs 64MB of video RAM but NextPVR uses some for the OSD hence the 128MB minimum spec for NextPVR. I found this out several years ago when using an old computer with 64MB of video RAM. It worked ok on a 1360 X 780 display but no OSD when used on 1920 X 1080 display. As your video card is supposed to have 128MB it would suggest it may have lost some memory as your 1024 X 768 would only use just over 25MB video RAM.

Chris

Interesting... I tried out a utility called Video Memory Stress Test, it reports 32MB video RAM, not 128 as indicated by XP!. (Catalyst Control Centre also shows 128MB) It tested ok as far as it was concerned. This is off topic so I'll stop here, just thought I'd mention the discovery.