MediaMVP Benefits

[jdrietz]

Does the MediaMVP provide any benefit besides allowing the computer with gb-pvr to be located away from the tv? If a have space - and my wife doesn't complain ;-) about having a computer next to the TV, is there still a benefit gained from having a MediaMVP?

[aegisx]

MVP is alot cheaper than a computer So you can have them next to several TV's.

[jdrietz]

Thanks - and agreed. Unfortunately, we still are the (slightly) proud owners of one TV.

[sub]

It also has the benefit of being silent.

[festus]

Terrific TV-out (standard definition) is a real plus, and you can have an MVP on each TV.

[jelder]

Is anyone else still experiencing problems with the MVP. FF/RW and skip back/ahead (prerecorded video, not live TV)is still totally unreliable for me.  Skip ahead will usually work the first few times, and then it will start skipping random amount forward, ie. 3 minutes, then like 6 minutes and then it will skip right to the end.  

Since this seems to be a user specific problem, I am listing my hardware so that maybe we can narrow this down.

I recently updated the via drivers and that did not help.  I have not yet updated the MB bios.

AMD Athlon XP2700+
Gigabyte 7VAXP (Via KT400 chipset)
Latest VIA drivers
2 x PVR 250's (22170 drivers I think - need to double check)
512mb ram
ATI 9700 Pro
2 80GB and 1 160gb HDD

[colin]

I would think that the major factors are:-

o what PVR card you are using
o what drivers you are using
o are you recording to the drive you have windows installed on

I know I have timestamp issues in the mpg's i have recorded but i believe this to be related to the fact that I had 1 HDD so recordings where being written to the same device that was running windows, doing swap, etc.

Also there is a bug in XP with HDD's and DMA misses which result in switching to PIO which again can affect performance on a single HDD system.

I have since installed SP2 and another HDD. Performance has improved but i have yet to watch a recording on the new drive since this was installed.

I do know that whilst it was recording a programme to the D drive my weekly virus scan kicked in on the C drive which didn't effect the recording. Before this would have clobbered the crap out of it.

Anyway, i'll run womble over a recording and see if it has the usual timestamp issues.

Cheers,
Colin.

[jelder]

Thanks for the reply Colin. I have edited my post above to include my encoding cards and HDD's. I do not record to the same drive that Windows is located on. I will go look at womble to see if I can learn anything from using that.

Thanks.