Which Windows??

[BigMoose]

I have a near perfect GBPVR solution currently running on Vista Ultimate 64 - I say near as all mpeg2 is perfect (smooth as silk news tickers etc) however H264 1080i is problematic. I can only get acceptably smooth performance on pans for sport (mostly soccer) using the PDVD H264 codecs and while these can be 100% perfect, every so often they stutter (where it looks like bad deinterlacing or every other frame is being dropped. Hard to explain but the same is true for 7.3, 8 and 9). It will playback perfectly for X minutes (where X can be anywhere from 0.5 to 30 or so) then ~5 seconds of stutter, then it can right itself for another X mins (or it might stutter until I get annoyed, exit PVRX2, restart and then I'm back to perfect for a while). The fact that it's fine after I exit the app and restart make me think something funny is going on in windows but I cant see anything running that would cause the problem. The CPU us always ~5%, I changed the on board HD3200 to a HD4660 so that has enough power... Memory is Dual Channel DDR2 1066 so I assume not a problem. I'm wondering if it's DXVA related and thus a Vista issue, an ATI driver issue or a PDVD codec issue...

Anyway the question really is what do people think is the best version of Windows to use for GBPVR? I have someone offering to get me a copy of Win7 and I'm wondering if its implementation of DXVA along with the fact it's not as hungry as Vista might see an improvement. That said, should I try XP for the laugh (I have a legit copy I'm not using elsewhere)? For Win7, does it make a difference if I get home premium or professional? I'm getting a new disk so can play around with XP/Win7 and see without screwing up my Vista installation I guess!

Any advice gratefully received.

[pcostanza]

I can only say I'm working very well in 2 W7 (x64) boxes. I did have problems in Vista but since I built a new machine, those have seemed to go away and I rarely boot into Vista or XP now.
Here's the comparison on Windows 7 versions. Basically, Pro gets you XP mode, domain support and backup and restore (which I still am not crazy about).

[BigMoose]

Thanks for your reply. The box in question does nothing other than run GBPVR connected to my LCD telly - so I assume win7 home prem/pro makes no difference to GBPVR? Cant see any reason why it should matter from that table... My network doesn't need domains.

[imagn]

Take what i say with a grain of salt, as i only did about 2 days of testing, and i dont have any h.264 1080i media, but my experience with win 7 on my client was not so good. My client has onboard ATI 3300HD and is connected via hdmi.

I currently have vista, but have the win 7 family pack and decided to upgrade on my test hard drive. I had sound issue with the 32bit and all my movies encoded in h.264 did not play well at all, many artifacts and cuase BSODS when playing, the 64bit was an improvement, i was able to get sound with the mpc hc audio codec but not though ac3 or ffdshow. I think h.264 played ok but wasnt like it was with vista, so i ended up sticking with vista as it worked great and palyback was perfect for me

Now i think i am the rare case that has had issues with win 7, but i think its more to do with drivers than with win 7, both my laptops were upgraded to win 7 and play nice with GBPVR but they have intel graphics.

So long story short, make sure you backup your current system incase you encounter issues

Overall also Win 7 is better than vista and would use it if video playback worked on my hardware as it should

[psycik]

We've found over here unless you have the latest about 9.8+ CCC drivers, that the ATI H.264 hardware decoding is utter garbage. I think it has finally started working lately, but not having one I can't confirm.

Most machines here in NZ are using the Nvidia range of cards for much better results (see my sig, have no problems with 1080p scrolling video).

[BigMoose]

Thanks for that - I've installed 9.11 so will see how that goes.

Question for I guess for Sub, I see on the Hauppauge site it says that the Win7 driver for the HVR-4000 doesn't support DVB-S2 for Windows Media Centre. Is that also true of GBPVR? I assume not actually as it implies winTV7 works for DVB-S2...

[sub]

Question for I guess for Sub, I see on the Hauppauge site it says that the Win7 driver for the HVR-4000 doesn't support DVB-S2 for Windows Media Centre. Is that also true of GBPVR? I assume not actually as it implies winTV7 works for DVB-S2...

GB-PVR should work fine with the HVR-4000 for DVB-S2 on Win7. I think the only reason WMC doesnt work is because it doesnt supply the "Roll Off" & "pilot" values need for DVB-S2 on this device (which cant auto detect these values).

[hoborg]

@jonedevis

You have two options, both have + and -

Win7: (do not care about Vista, Win7 is "fixed" Vista)
+ included MPEG-2 and H.264 decoder (h.264 decoder need to be replaced if you have ATI, MPEG-2 need to replaced if you want to play DVDs with working navigation)
+ faster than Vista
+ little faster S3 wake up then XP
- still slower then XP
- hard to modify (replace decoders, etc)
- still new system - can have troubles with hidden (undiscovered) bugs, drivers, etc.
- older software can not work correctly (mostly on x64 OS version)

WinXP:
+ fastest OS
+ easy to setup
+ simply to change to not look as "windows" OS
+ easy to modify
+ preaty stable system
+ no problem with DVD + DXVA navigation
- no decoders

Both OS are DXVA compatible.
Personaly i prefer XP, i have rock stable HTPC based on it.

[BigMoose]

I started off with a box runing XP that had some single core (fairly high speed) Intel chip and an ATI AGP HD2600XT, then Vista with a Dual Core AMD and HD3200 (later added an HD4650 PCIe) codecs configured by me. Now have Win7 on that box (dual booted with Vista) using the SAF pack. I'm still in the early stages of the Win7 setup but initial view would show it to be the best of the lot so far. But the real test will be on sat night wen recording an HD and SD channel at the same time while watching the HD recording as it progresses. All were attempting to output @1080p50 to my LCD telly. For what it's worth my thoughts so far are:

XP: I could never get VRM9 FSE to work - picture had tearing in the middle. VMR9 Custom was OK but not perfect. Had the odd stutter and never got it perfectly smooth. Likely due to the AGP HD2600XT and crappy ATI drivers back then. 1080p wouldn't work smoothly. 720p50 was the best I could reliably get. Again assume due to hardware and/or ATI drivers.

Vista64: EVR is nice. Much perfer the look to VMR9 under XP. Had no tearing either. Mpeg2 and H264 acceleration working, 100% silky smooth mpeg2 playback for SD (news tickers are perfect) but HD 1080i H264 playback can be perfect for a while then stutters (see earlier posts). With the HD3200, OSD would cause 1080p display to stutter while OSD up (fine at 720p). The HD4650 gives perfect smooth playback at 1080p when OSD is up.

Win7: couldn't get the PDVD9 codec to work when setting it up myself, no idea why. Same one worked fine on Vista. So removed all and tried the SAF Pack. It works perfectly. So far I've not seen any SD or HD live TV stutter at all and my mkv/m2ts/blu-ray disk playback is great. I never used SAF for the vista setup cause my earlier read of the SAF thread implied it used the Haali splitter for all mkv/m2ts content and I had Blu-rays that wouldn't play the DTS track with the Haali splitter but the MPC Gabest one kinda did (even though it didn't alwast choose the audio stream I wanted - it chose French often). However I see now that SAF is using the MPC splitter in the graph after playing a blu-ray disk and is set up much much better with ffdshow to get the right sound track than I ever managed when configuring the codecs myself. One particular disk that always played in french now picks a DTS track I didn't know existed! I've still got one mkv file that will only play in German but I know why that is and hopefully one day there will be a fix!

I'll see how the weekend goes with me and the wife using the win7 installation but so far it seems the best setup I've had yet.

[athomas]

My win 7 installation fixed some minor tearing issues that had been plaguing me in XP for ages. Win 7 seems to handle video playback much better than XP. The sleep function is really snappy too. My machine wakes up and is ready to watch movies or shows in just 15 seconds.