Hauppauge HVR1600

[bckappen]

One good way to see if it is your video card is to install media player classic (not from M$). This player comes with built-in codecs and is excellent in playing HD stuff in lower-powered system. If MPC can play it, and GBPVR does not, then it is the combination of decoder/vmr settings you have.

[zaphod7501]

There are many possibilities. I'll try to list some of the things that I've heard about in the past.
PCI bus interruptions. This can be things like sound card drivers (SBlive are notorious) Network drivers, etc. There are latency settings that can help here. Getting to them can be a trick. Powerstrip has the ability to alter tham as well as some BIOSes.

Motherboard PCI/AGP drivers from the manufacturer. Most systems work without them but they can be helpfull.
IDE/SATA controllers: Usually the mfr drivers are needed; sometmes Window's standard drivers are better (Windows has some broken built-in VIA drivers that must never be allowed to install: a full OS reinstall is required to correct this)

Big hard drives with small clusters (converted drives). Bigger is better for video.

Single vs multiple hard drives. Most video users put the OS and swap file on one drive and video on the other. Some even put the swap on a third drive.

Indexing: turn it off.
Messenger Service: (not Instant Messenger) turn it off.
AntiVirus: pull the network/internet connection then try with it off or file scanning disabled.
Video Card drivers: Roll back. I've read that certain newer driver versions kill 1080i on ATI. (especially with AGP cards)

Alternate Players: MediaPlayerClassic is one. You can add external filters selectively. This is currently my experimenting mode.

Bad broadcast: possible but not likely. Something like ec.exe can scan for certain errors. I think TSReaderLite can scan files also.

MultiMonitor: This could cause problems. The NVIDIA control panel indicates that this is using hardware acceleration. Perhaps the hardware can do either/or but-not-both under these conditions. I'm afraid to mess with this one right now but it could be my particular problem.

Optical Drives: Turn off autorun/autoplay. Remove any optical disks from drives. Some burning programs will constantly monitor these drives tying up the PCI bus for brief periods (microseconds).
Network activity: Set the network icon to appear on the lower bar to see if there is regular scanning activity.

I'm sure that there's more but that's all I can think of right now.

[Cahill84]

O.k. What I've done is used TSreader lite to monitor the signal for a minute trial period for each physical channel I receive. It's only four so it didn't take that long. I'm attaching the printscreens that I cropped of each channel. Channel 10.1 & 10.2 or physical channel 53 is the one that always skips. Do you think it's the Hauppauge drivers, the broadcaster, or the 1080i? I was just noticing that there are significantly more errors on that channel, and that should mean something considering it has the strongest signal. You're probably more adept with this than I so, I thought I would ask your opinion.

[zaphod7501]

This may or not be of any help to you but I've helped out my 720p and 1080i software playback considerably under Mplayer9 and MediaPlayerClassic by installing the hcwSMD07 Hauppauge decoder. This installs the Mainconcept decoder. Windows Media Player picked it up immediately and CPU dropped from 100% to well under 50%. I had no control, however, so it would not display videos on both monitors (one is a front projector).

MPC allowed me to add it as an external filter which I gave preferred status and CPU dropped to under 50% also (but a little more than Mplayer). Here I could pick many options and it will show on both monitors. I can get settings pages for the filters and can set deinterlacing and other options (under MPC; the settings don't seem to carry over to Mplayer)

The 9X series NVIDIA drivers are supposed to allow applications to access the PureVideo hardware without buying the PureVideo software. I could never test it before because the software that came with the video card (NX7600GS) had Win2000 drivers but all of the applications were XP only:mad:. This is with a Sempron3000+ (Barton core 2000Mhz).

This does not help under GB-PVR since it doesn't see the Mainconcept/Elecard filter under playback config options even though Mplayer and MPC are using it without any problems (at least for now?).

Cahill84, the ATI X1650 should have something called AVIVO to enable hardware accelleration for mpeg2. I have no idea how it is enabled or which drivers or Catalyst control panel is needed but it may be needed for better HD playback. I only know anything about it from Tom's Hardware's comparison of PureVideo vs AVIVO article. (still waiting for the HD version of the article that they promised, the first was on DVD performance)

[Cahill84]

I can't find that setting. I have it listed that I can accelerate wmv files, but not mpeg. I dunno.

[zaphod7501]

Here was the Tom's article. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/09/a...purevideo/ The settings are supposed to be Catalyst control center somewhere and don't seem to be labeled very clearly.

In Media Player Classic when I added the Mainconcept decoder as an external filter it was just called something like "hwc mpeg2 decoder" (can't check right now).

[replaytv]

off topic,

zaphod7501,

Do you have any knowledge whether US NTSC PVR150 will accept PAL signal using the composite video? I am planning to use the US PVR150 in a PAL broadcast country and want to know if it works.

Thanks.

Dan L.



[quote=zaphod7501]Thanks again. I use the Hollywood for converting PAL to NTSC (and the reverse) and for real-time re-encoding using an S-Video loop back to the PVR250. That's why the 250 is still in the machine. The HVR1600 won't do PAL on the line inputs like all the previous Hauppauge cards (at least we haven't figured out how).

QUOTE]

[Cahill84]

I will try the other players when I get around to it. For now, I e-mailed Hauppauge to see what they said about the problems with the broadcasting stuff. Maybe they will be able to offer a solution. I dunno. I have a lot of stuff to test for the time being.

Thanks for your hep,
Anthony

[zaphod7501]

Do you have any knowledge whether US NTSC PVR150 will accept PAL signal using the composite video?

It should but I don't remember the procedure off hand. You might have to use the older WinTv2k (not sure about driver versions but shs has a pretty good selection on his ftp) rather than the new hybrid version. I've used third party software so long that I'm not familiar with the WinTv2k settings. I would go over to shspvr.com and do a search on the subject.

[Cahill84]

O.k. so I figured out that it's not the players per se. I read that article and there was something that I wasn't using by ATI. The 3:2 Pulldown by ATI instead of the arbitrary program. Granted the playback is not perfect it still does play much smoother. So two more channels are much more viewable. I also had to roll back to the 3.2a drivers.

-Anthony