2009-11-14, 06:47 PM
Hi,
I have been using GBPVR for a few months now but only encountered problems recently and had to spend time searching the forum - many thanks for those who have posted suggestions to various issues that have also helped me.
Everything for me was perfect until I went to add a Satellite DVB-S2 card card to my 2x DVB-T setup. Then the fun began. I wanted to put down a few notes just in case they can help someone.
PCI Setup:
My board is uATX with 3x PCI and 1x PCI-E. The order of the cards has a definate impact on the scan channel success. Even now one of my DVB-T cards will miss "Yesturday" & "ITV4", I add these after (see next section). I also bought the extension board that gave me 2x extra PCI slots - while cards are detected and drivers installed I got no channels during scanning.
Scan channel caches:
The supplied WinTV7 found every channel for FreeSat plus a lot more, GBPVR did not even after scanning both Astra 2A/2B/2D & Eurobird. I found a post where someone had posted their scan cache minus all the tat channels. I referenced this against the Lyngsat website and made the changes where required and also added some channels that GBPVR did find but weren't in the cache I downloaded. ITV HD had already been added. After scanning with GBVPR I swapped out the scan cache contents with this altered file, now I only have the channels I am interested in and they all work. Just map them to XML EPG (where possible) and perfect. This is how I add my 2 missing channels to DVB-T card 1 in my system, info added from scan cache of the 2nd card that does see those channels.
I can post/send my scan cache files if required.
EPG:
Originally I used EPG from broadcast, no issues what so ever. With the DVB-S2 and the time taken to download EPG I moved to XML. For whatever reason, I am not special! Took me a good while to realise that you need to add as many channels as you are expecting to the grabber as possible as when you MAP channels this forms the left pane of the mapping screen. So even if you find a lot more channels when scanning, you can't MAP them and therefore view them. They can be added, but obvisouly will show no EPG data in the guide. The part where I struggled was that the list below the live preview window (actual found channels) had more channels than the far left pane (derived from XML EPG). i.e. For channel Zing I have no grabber from radio times, so it wont appear in the left pane what so ever even though I can preview it in the live window.
HD Playback
The H.264 codec I had was Arcsoft (instaled by WinTV7?) - BBC HD was OK but ITV HD stuttered. After lots of fiddling I have settled on he H.264 codec from PowerDVD 7.3 Deluxe. I have to set this as the H.264 codec but also choose the same PDVD 7.3 codec for standard mpeg2 playback (not H.264 though). If I choose another mpeg2 codec not from PDVD7.3 I get stutter on non-H.264 channels. With this setup I sometimes get choppy playback, even with mpeg2 standard TV but a system restart cures the problem. Not perfect I know, but then again I hard ever watch LIVE TV and even less HD LIVE TV.
CPU Usage
Just in case you want to know:
Arcsoft codec HD playback was 100% CPU
PDVD 7.3 SD TV is ~20%
PDVD 7.3 HD TV is ~50%
I need an upgrade to dual core and better graphics card but her indoors denies the cash!
I hope this benefits some people.
I have been using GBPVR for a few months now but only encountered problems recently and had to spend time searching the forum - many thanks for those who have posted suggestions to various issues that have also helped me.
Everything for me was perfect until I went to add a Satellite DVB-S2 card card to my 2x DVB-T setup. Then the fun began. I wanted to put down a few notes just in case they can help someone.
PCI Setup:
My board is uATX with 3x PCI and 1x PCI-E. The order of the cards has a definate impact on the scan channel success. Even now one of my DVB-T cards will miss "Yesturday" & "ITV4", I add these after (see next section). I also bought the extension board that gave me 2x extra PCI slots - while cards are detected and drivers installed I got no channels during scanning.
Scan channel caches:
The supplied WinTV7 found every channel for FreeSat plus a lot more, GBPVR did not even after scanning both Astra 2A/2B/2D & Eurobird. I found a post where someone had posted their scan cache minus all the tat channels. I referenced this against the Lyngsat website and made the changes where required and also added some channels that GBPVR did find but weren't in the cache I downloaded. ITV HD had already been added. After scanning with GBVPR I swapped out the scan cache contents with this altered file, now I only have the channels I am interested in and they all work. Just map them to XML EPG (where possible) and perfect. This is how I add my 2 missing channels to DVB-T card 1 in my system, info added from scan cache of the 2nd card that does see those channels.
I can post/send my scan cache files if required.
EPG:
Originally I used EPG from broadcast, no issues what so ever. With the DVB-S2 and the time taken to download EPG I moved to XML. For whatever reason, I am not special! Took me a good while to realise that you need to add as many channels as you are expecting to the grabber as possible as when you MAP channels this forms the left pane of the mapping screen. So even if you find a lot more channels when scanning, you can't MAP them and therefore view them. They can be added, but obvisouly will show no EPG data in the guide. The part where I struggled was that the list below the live preview window (actual found channels) had more channels than the far left pane (derived from XML EPG). i.e. For channel Zing I have no grabber from radio times, so it wont appear in the left pane what so ever even though I can preview it in the live window.
HD Playback
The H.264 codec I had was Arcsoft (instaled by WinTV7?) - BBC HD was OK but ITV HD stuttered. After lots of fiddling I have settled on he H.264 codec from PowerDVD 7.3 Deluxe. I have to set this as the H.264 codec but also choose the same PDVD 7.3 codec for standard mpeg2 playback (not H.264 though). If I choose another mpeg2 codec not from PDVD7.3 I get stutter on non-H.264 channels. With this setup I sometimes get choppy playback, even with mpeg2 standard TV but a system restart cures the problem. Not perfect I know, but then again I hard ever watch LIVE TV and even less HD LIVE TV.
CPU Usage
Just in case you want to know:
Arcsoft codec HD playback was 100% CPU
PDVD 7.3 SD TV is ~20%
PDVD 7.3 HD TV is ~50%
I need an upgrade to dual core and better graphics card but her indoors denies the cash!
I hope this benefits some people.