Strange screen display with mvpmc

[mvallevand]

If you are are experiencing any difficult with your screen with emulation mode and GBPVR 1.2.13 or higher ensure that you are running the alpha dongle or donglex2a.zip. Report any troubles here

If there are no problems in the next week I will update mvpmc.org so that this can be built in to the nightlies.

Martin

[valkokir]

Tonight I installed 1.2.13 and the new dongle in donglex2a (2008-05-04) and I am seeing a slow refresh rate in the emulation mode menus. On the main menu when I scroll through its very choppy. On the submenus with the green highlighting, the highlight moves patially to the next button and then half a second the rest catch up. On the recordings menu, moving from "Play" to "Delete" always leaves a chunk of the green highlight on "Play" and is repeatable every time. I'm running the MVP on the "Default" skin.
The new dongle definitely is correctly loaded because it is showing the new dongle date on bootup. Prior to today I didn't see these artifacts, I was running 1.2.9 and 2007-08-30 dongle.
I reset all my network gear to ensure that wasn't the issue.
Is this the "Strange screen display" you are referring to?

Thanks

[mvallevand]

Yes, this is incremental updates which sub turned on by default in 1.2.13 I personally don't like the overall feel of it with the MVP and mvpmc (I can't get it to work at all with Vista and the Hauppauge dongle for comparison) so you might want to turn it off in config.xml with <MVPUseIncrementalUpdates>false</MVPUseIncrementalUpdates>. It is slightly faster but as you found there still are a few areas that don't do perfect updates (sub will probably fix these as he encounters them himself).

On the PCH it does look a bit better with SD because of faster screen updates and in HD modes it really makes quite a positive difference.

Martin

[HarryH3]

I was seeing the same thing, especially when stepping through the "stations" I have setup in Net Radio. It was like the MVP had to redraw the entire screen each time that I used the down and up arrows to move to a different station.

A quick search found post #2 by sub in this thread:

Which asked:
"Do you have <MVPUseIncrementalUpdates>false</MVPUseIncrementalUpdates> in your config.xml?"

Mine was "true" after the 1.2.13 upgrade. Changing it to "false" cured the problem.

I was seeing it with the mvpmc dongle from 10-14-2007 and with the one from 04-05-2008, so it seems to be something different that the new version of GBPVR was doing. I checked my copy of config.xml from before the upgrade (1.2.9 before) and the statement is set to "true" there. It seems to me that the logic has been reversed somehow, at least by the way the display onscreen is behaving when using the MVP.

[HarryH3]

Post collision!

[valkokir]

Yes, this is incremental updates which sub turned on by default in 1.2.13 I personally don't like the overall feel of it with the MVP and mvpmc (I can't get it to work at all with Vista and the Hauppauge dongle for comparison) so you might want to turn it off in config.xml with <MVPUseIncrementalUpdates>false</MVPUseIncrementalUpdates>. It is slightly faster but as you found there still are a few areas that don't do perfect updates (sub will probably fix these as he encounters them himself).

On the PCH it does look a bit better with SD because of faster screen updates and in HD modes it really makes quite a positive difference.

Martin

Thank you, that fixed it. I noticed this in the revision notes for 1.2.9 but since it defaulted to "false" in that version I didn't think to check it on this one.

Thanks

Kirk

[lenor]

huhu martin, i was just exploring your great work here! sorry, newbe ;-)
anyway, with mvpmc.bin (taken from here: http://www.mvpmc.org/~mvallevand/donglex2a.zip) the tv-screen is flickering badly, whereas with dongle.bin it works out fine. what am i doing wrong? should i post some logs out here? thanks for any comment!

[mvallevand]

Logs don't hurt but if it true flicker on an old CRT I am not sure it is implemented correctly in mvpmc. We don't have documentation on this and I don't get flicker on any set I own. I know pz1 reports seeing flicker too.

Martin

[lenor]

oh yes, its truly an old CRT >> Schneider TV-8-70315, about 12 years old? i just did not even get a useful google-result it was fairly cheap when i bought it once, and still works without any issues well, so i'll stick with dongle.bin for the present thank you for your quick reply!

[mvallevand]

No problem. I am surprised that there is a flicker in a 12 year system, I meant old. If you still have mvpmc loaded you can always test by connecting with telnet to the mvp and issuing these command to see if the flicker control works

killall mvpmc
mvpmc -m pal --flicker 3 --emulate ? --startup emulate

Martin