Matrox G450 and GBPVR

[kiwijaffa]

Hope this is the right place to ask this question..

I was wondering if anyone has experience running a dual head Matrox G450 with GBPVR and whether they had any issues with it or whether there are any tricks getting it to work? I've currently got it set to "clone" mode where the 1st head is cloned on the 2nd head connected to the TV (quality of TV output is superb for normal screens within Windows)

Whilst setting up my PVR I had a standard monitor attached to it on head 1, I experienced choppy video playback (ver .98B) but managed to fix this by using VMR7. VMR9 or VMR9 custom resulted in choppy playback and out of synch audio.

Now the PVR is configured and setup in the lounge and connected to the TV on the 2nd head only of the Matrox card (tv out). When playing a recorded show, timeshifted tv or live TV all i get is a black screen with audio when set to overlay or VMR7. The menus etc are fine.

VMR9 and 9 custom gives me a picture with audio but it's a blurry, choppy picture and out of synch audio again.

I've tried Cyberlink and Nero decoders instead of "system default" but they give me the same result. I've also tried disabling livepreview mode and switching off the osd and teletext with the same result.

If I record a show and play it back on another pc the quality is fine, the video is not blurry and the audio is in synch so it's recording ok.

I'm not sure what to do next to fix the problem, as I don't know if it's something in GBPVR's config (decoders?) or whether it's the TV out on the Matrox card. i do know the Matrox's 2nd head is not accelerated at all would this make a difference? Why would VMR7 work on a monitor but not on the tV out?

The software is great, just wish I could fix this annoying problem.

Thanks in advance,

Robert

[stefan]

Not that I have any answer for you, but I'm curious... you don't say whether you tried overlay, and whether it worked if you did try...

[dottore]

you should use overlay with that card. i have a g400dualhead and only overlay works really good.

i've set it to maxdvd, no clone mode, then i changed the displays to have the main display on the tv screen (just drag and drop number two the left of number one), set this one to active and deactivated the other one. now i have 800x600 matrox tv-out on the tv, nearly as good as native dvd-players.

[kiwijaffa]

I did try overlay but only got the black screen with audio. I have not however tried swapping the displays round and disabling head 1, so I'll try that tonight and report back. Thanks for the replies thus far..

[Haggis]

Ive seen the same problem. I have a ATI 9250 PCI with my LCD tv connected to the DVI output and projector on the VGA. The DVI is fine but a blank screen on the projector. Its running in overlay mode, and the ATI driver is set to clone.
One thing I did notice is that when I ran Power DVD 5, I then got a picture on the projector and TV, although the projector pic was a bit stuttery. Havn't had much time to try it again but will post when I do.

[kiwijaffa]

I did try overlay but only got the black screen with audio. I have not however tried swapping the displays round and disabling head 1, so I'll try that tonight and report back. Thanks for the replies thus far..

OK, tried the above but that didn't totally fix my problem, was better but not great. So after about 4 hours of frustrating "fiddling" I've finally got it working at an acceptable level by:

Setting head 2 to the primary display.
Disabling head 1.
Using overlay as the playback renderer.
Using Nero Video and Audio Decoders.
Setting the display to 640 X 480 true colour.
REDUCING the Hardware Acceleration on the video card to a point where it disables direct X (I can't get my head around why this works?) There are 4 levels of hardware acceleration on this card from 1-4 where 1 is off and 4 is max, I've got it set to 3. Anything less than this and it doesn't work.

Anyway all fixed. Hopefully this might help other people.

Robert