Windows 7 - horrible compared to XP - help!

[siliconaudio]

Hi Guys,

I spent a chunk of time yesterday reinstalling my PVR with Windows 7 x64. One of the first issues I came up against was this one (glitchy sound).

But the big problem, which is a complete show-stopper, is very glitchy video. What I am seeing is intermittent tearing. The image will be fine for a second or two, then tear, then ok, then tear again. Sometimes this causes bad stutters, this is most noticeable watching sports. Even watching a news ticker, as it moves across the screen it will alternate between very clean and then blurry with tearing every few seconds. I have tried various splitters and video decoders, but nothing makes any difference at all.

I know it takes time to get this stuff tuned, but at least in XP, when I changed decoders I could see a difference and keep experimenting until I found flawless playback. It seems that Windows 7, nothing makes a difference. The codecs that were flawless in XP are very poor in Win 7.

It really feels to me that the codecs aren't the problem, rather something in the guts of Windows 7 just screws up de-interlacing. I'm almost ready to roll back to XP. Anyone got a clue with this?

Win 7 x64
AMD 6000+ dual core
2 GB DDR2 800
AMD HD 4670 Video card with 10.3 CCC & Drivers
2 x Twinhan AD-SP200 DVB-S
GBPVR 1.4.7

[pcostanza]

Have you tried turning hardware acceleration off? Also, do you have the latest DirectX installed? I've not seen any of this in my systems but I have seen your problem posted many times since W7 came out.

[siliconaudio]

Thanks Paul, I'll check those points out when I get home. Also, I'm wondering if I need to delete "C:\Users\<Your Acount>\AppData\Local\Virtual Store\Program Files\Devnz" every time I make a change to the config. I can see that changes get written to the config.xml file, but they don't seem to go live. Is this something that you "just have to do" in Windows 7?

[sub]

You may need to set the permissions on config.xml and gbpvr.db3 so all users have full permissions to those files. The installer actually does that, but if the files are later recreated, these permissions can get logs.

The next release makes it a bit UAC friendly.

[Pob]

Hi Guys,

I spent a chunk of time yesterday reinstalling my PVR with Windows 7 x64. One of the first issues I came up against was this one (glitchy sound).

But the big problem, which is a complete show-stopper, is very glitchy video. What I am seeing is intermittent tearing. The image will be fine for a second or two, then tear, then ok, then tear again. Sometimes this causes bad stutters, this is most noticeable watching sports. Even watching a news ticker, as it moves across the screen it will alternate between very clean and then blurry with tearing every few seconds. I have tried various splitters and video decoders, but nothing makes any difference at all.

I know it takes time to get this stuff tuned, but at least in XP, when I changed decoders I could see a difference and keep experimenting until I found flawless playback. It seems that Windows 7, nothing makes a difference. The codecs that were flawless in XP are very poor in Win 7.

It really feels to me that the codecs aren't the problem, rather something in the guts of Windows 7 just screws up de-interlacing. I'm almost ready to roll back to XP. Anyone got a clue with this?

Win 7 x64
AMD 6000+ dual core
2 GB DDR2 800
AMD HD 4670 Video card with 10.3 CCC & Drivers
2 x Twinhan AD-SP200 DVB-S
GBPVR 1.4.7

One thing to try is DPC latency checker - http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml - if you have any bars goiing into the red then could be a driver issue. A lot of Win7 drivers are still iffy.
I dual boot XP and WIN7 - I use Win7 most now for GBPVR, though still some kinks need ironing out, like the sound issue you linked to, and I cannot get the menu navigation in DVD's working. Like you I was less than impressed after installing Win 7 for the first time, but it's worth persevering - I tihink...

[Pob]

Thanks Paul, I'll check those points out when I get home. Also, I'm wondering if I need to delete "C:\Users\<Your Acount>\AppData\Local\Virtual Store\Program Files\Devnz" every time I make a change to the config. I can see that changes get written to the config.xml file, but they don't seem to go live. Is this something that you "just have to do" in Windows 7?

You could turn off UAC - though there is some debate on the pro's and con's of this;
http://forums.gbpvr.com//showthread.php?...n-the-desk

[BigMoose]

I've never seen a con mentioned!!

and I cannot get the menu navigation in DVD's working.

What navigator/codec combo are you using? It works fine for me although sometimes an MS decoder gets higher priority and is used and that doesn't work. I think from comments around the SAF pack that win7 and EVR doesn't work with dxva for DVD navigation and you have to use a software codec. So I think mine is configured with ffdshow for dvd and it works fine - I am not 100% sure of the config and can check later. Either way the SAF setup worked perfectly for DVDs for me with win7 as long as you stop one of the MS codecs from taking over.

I've gone from XP -> Vista x64 -> Win7 x64 and currently have my best set up yet and I wouldn't go back. Maybe I'm lucky using spdif for sound as I dont have any issues there... I turned UAC off the moment it caused the slightest issue on Vista and never considered turning it on again. The machine's only function is to be a PVR so I can see no benefit at all of UAC in this case.

[siliconaudio]

Hi Guys - I'm making significant progress now. I definitely had to remove "C:\Users\<Your Acount>\AppData\Local\Virtual Store\Program Files\Devnz". When this was in place, changes I was making in the config were being ignored. So far I have found the best combo is the PDVD7 codec and VMR9 fullscreen exclusive. I have found EVR is very jerky to the point of absolutely unusable with any codec. I have the system stable enough now that I'm no longer in any hurry to roll back to XP.

I've heard good things about EVR on this forum, but so far for me, it's a dog. Not sure what I'm doing wrong there... At least now I have a stable system, I can take my time to tune and tweak without risk of divorce

Thanks for all the tips.

Bill.

[hoborg]

@siliconaudio:

-you are on ATI - make sure you enabled vsync in CCC (3D section - must be alwas on)
-make sure you have aero enabled
-you need to use EVR if you want to use DXVA
-use SAF 5.0 - link below
-update deirectx (this will do SAF automatically)

BTW, what type is your TV/monitor (CRT/LCD/plazma/...)

[Pob]

I've never seen a con mentioned!!



What navigator/codec combo are you using? It works fine for me although sometimes an MS decoder gets higher priority and is used and that doesn't work. I think from comments around the SAF pack that win7 and EVR doesn't work with dxva for DVD navigation and you have to use a software codec. So I think mine is configured with ffdshow for dvd and it works fine - I am not 100% sure of the config and can check later. Either way the SAF setup worked perfectly for DVDs for me with win7 as long as you stop one of the MS codecs from taking over.

I've gone from XP -> Vista x64 -> Win7 x64 and currently have my best set up yet and I wouldn't go back. Maybe I'm lucky using spdif for sound as I dont have any issues there... I turned UAC off the moment it caused the slightest issue on Vista and never considered turning it on again. The machine's only function is to be a PVR so I can see no benefit at all of UAC in this case.

I have been using PDVD 7 for all my video decoding, cos I got it free with my blue ray drive and it works well on TV and H264 files and Mpeg4 files, all with DXVA acceleration. Only DVD navigation did not work using Cyberlink or DVD navigator (It does in XP). However, after posting I tried some other combinaitons and finally got one that worked - DVD navigator and PP mpeg decoder. I have no idea where this PP decoder came from - def. not something I installed!