MVP user experience

[idkpmiller]

I finally purchased an MediaMVP :-)

Unfortunately my experience has not been great. I have two main issues one which I am working on fixing as I believe much of the issue lies with my main GBPVR server; is that live TV is awful. jerky and artifacts all over the place.

However I don't believe the second issue is the main GBPVR servers fault. he scrolling up and down file lists is really erratic and so slow. it is really annoying to use, any one any tips on how to improve the experience? I hope this is not Normal experience...

Thanks

[Jaggy]

I finally purchased an MediaMVP :-)

I hope you didn't pay much for it?

Unfortunately my experience has not been great. I have two main issues one which I am working on fixing as I believe much of the issue lies with my main GBPVR server; is that live TV is awful. jerky and artifacts all over the place.

I always found playback to be very good, but I hardly ever watch live TV, what do recordings playback like? What are you recording from & what format is it recording? Remembering the MVP (with the Hauppauge dongle) will only playback .mpg's natively all other formats are transcoded on the fly

However I don't believe the second issue is the main GBPVR servers fault. he scrolling up and down file lists is really erratic and so slow. it is really annoying to use, any one any tips on how to improve the experience? I hope this is not Normal experience...

"erratic" isn't something I have seem on my MVP's. Slow unfortunately is a subjective word, what for one person is slow for another is crawling.

The MVP is slow when moving around the menus but you do get used to it reasonably quickly, but it isn't a good idea to page down a large number of times without waiting for it to catch up (I found about 3 page downs...wait for a few seconds...then another 3 seemed to work fairly well). I also found changing to the mvpmc dongle made a large difference on my setup & made the whole experience much nicer. Another thing is the network side of the MVP isn't all that good so for testing you should try short cables with the server & MVP connected directly to your router if you can.

If you want a media extender that works brilliantly with GB & moves through the menus at close to the same speed as a PC you should consider one of the NMT's (Popcorn Hour, EGreat etc.)

[HarryH3]

I have two MVP's running from the weak server listed in my sig. Other than it taking a while to prepare the screens for display, they work great. Like Jaggy said, if you don't record to mpeg, then the server has to transcode the file to mpeg before sending the data to the MVP.

Even with the wimpy server, we can watch recorded shows from both MVP's at once, while the server records other shows.

[idkpmiller]

By eratic I mean I can go down say four or five items in quick succesion then it will pause on the display for a second or so then continue to accept buffered remote key presses.

I already use the mvpmc dongle and I cant honestly say why but it does "feel" better than the stock dongle.

I didn't realise that Egreat supported GBPVR or vice versa, the PCH was around an extra 100NZD and I coundlt justify the difference at the time :-(
perhaps I can in hindsight....

It would seem reading between the lines that the slow response to remote key presses is normal and I may have been better to have stuck with the GBPVR PC client I had setup :-(

Thanks Guys.

[martint123]

I never had problems either with an MVP. The delays with keypresses were minimal and no what you seem to be seeing.

You aren't using wireless networking anywhere are you?? - a known source of problems with remote media devices.

[Jaggy]

When I said slow I didn't mean to imply it was "painfully slow" as I said you get used to it being slower than when using a PC. If it wasn't more than usable I wouldn't have purchased three of them & used them for a number of years. The only reason I got my NMT was so I could play .ts recordings with skip etc. recorded from our DVB-S.

I still think you should (if you haven't already) try hooking it up with short leads & both it & the server direct to your router unhooking anything else on the network to see if that's faster.

[zehd]

I've always had the same patience for the MVP like I would have for remote desktop on a slightly slower external ISP.

It's pretty cool what it does, but you have to understand that it doesn't do THAT much on board. It just takes Video and Audio data from the GB-PVR server and displays it. So it's also like an under spec'd PC Client.

(Mostly)