ALDI PC and DVBT

Hi,

I have a Medion MD8828 PC with a Creatix SAA 7131 triple tuner.
I was getting a perfect picture from Clermont Cairn for the trials.
If I tune it in under Windows Media Center I get 8 channels, 4 TV and 4 Radio however I get no picture, sound only.
I use Nero it tunes in 4 channels all TV, however cannot get any sound or picture.

Do I need to get a new TV card for the PC or is there a software upgrade?

Thanks

The_Conductor

The digital tuner in the Aldi PC is only MPEG-2.
The latest RTE trials are MPEG-4.
You will be unable to get picture on the TV stations, but will get sound, unless you buy a new MPEG-4 compatible digital tuner.

There are different ones available- heres a nice one though.

S.

danIrl

A software upgrade should suffice. Since the new transmissions are still using DVB-T, your old card should work fine. You just need an MPEG4-AVC decoder.

If you have a recent CPU, then you could use ffdshow, which is free.
Otherwise for a few quid, the CoreAVC one is quite good. They have a 14-day trial version.

Recent video cards also have HW accleration for MPEG AVC, which would take the load off the CPU.

peneau

danIrl wrote: »

A software upgrade should suffice. Since the new transmissions are still using DVB-T, your old card should work fine. You just need an MPEG4-AVC decoder.

If you have a recent CPU, then you could use ffdshow, which is free.
Otherwise for a few quid, the CoreAVC one is quite good. They have a 14-day trial version.

Recent video cards also have HW accleration for MPEG AVC, which would take the load off the CPU.

DanIrl, I have a HVR-3000 hooked up to my PC and until the tests finished it was picking up the mpeg 2 transmissions using the HVR-3000's own software WinTV (dog of a product).

I'm now using DVB Viewer Pro and it's picking up the MPEG 4 Transmissions from Three Rock Audio and Video and I was wondering how do you enable HW acceleration?

Many thanks.

WinXP Pro(service pack 2 & 3) Pentium4 3.0ghz, 2.5gb Ram,ATI Raedeon X1950Pro, Hauppauge HVR-3000

watty

Depends on what graphics card and software you have. It also only really makes a big difference for HD MPEG4 (five times the CPU power needed for HD).

the ATI X series was supposed to have great HW MPEG acceleration. It seems to be a damp squib. They now don't promote the Amino platform accelerator for X1600 to X1900 series and it never did anything much.

So for SD, I'd not worry.

The basic problem is that unless you can set refresh to 50, 75 or 100Hz the frame rate conversion makes any movement look rubbish and eats more CPU.

The second problem is that PC based deinterlacing (and even Farujia chips on progressive TVs) can never do as good a job as eyes + phosphor decay on a TV CRT that is native interlaced.

If using an LCD, you also need a backlight strobing at refresh rate or the image movements smear badly no matter how fast an LCD it is. (Plasmas have different problems).

Generally PCs are rubbish for watching TV compared with a sub €100 TV and suitable set box.

Decent LCD/Plasma approaching TV quality for SD and able to do HD are still over €1,800!

peneau

Wow what a reply, not too sure how much of it I understand, thanks for that Watty much obliged.

danIrl

I really only use my standard PC for testing.

My main viewing is on my LCD with dvi input from my homebrew PVR.
It only has a basic Sempron CPU and an old Radeon 9550. Still is works fine for MPEG-AVC with CoreAVC decoder, albeit at higher CPU load than MPEG-2.

Generally the options to enable HW acceleration if your decoder supports them are enabled via the decoder property settings. Can use RadLight Filter, select the filter and then hit properties.

But as Watty says, probably not a big deal with SD. Your spec should handle it on the CPU directly.

I think Watty is a purist, it certainly looks good to me on my TV.

peneau

Nice one DanIrl, thanks for that.

Myxomatosis

All you need to get MPEG4 / H.264 working with your tuner is the appropriate codec.

uregare wrote: »

If I tune it in under Windows Media Center I get 8 channels, 4 TV and 4 Radio however I get no picture, sound only.

BUT even with a H.264 codec installed you aren't going to be using Windows Media Center for some time yet as they've somehow managed to not get DVB-T / MPEG4 working.

watty

MCE of XP or Vista only works properly with USA Analog TV and mostly with European Analogue TV.

Some USA cable TV support (Cable Card).


DVBs (Satellite) seems to be even worse supported than DVBt

However XP (not Vista or MCE) with DVBprog or DVB viewer etc and supplied drivers for Satellite or Terrestrial cards is a dream compared to Linux

watty

watty wrote: »

DVBs (Satellite) seems to be even worse supported than DVBt

Yep, seems to be a hack which "wraps" the satellite frequencies to UHF ones.

STB

Anyone tried this ?

http://www.sesamtv.com/index_en.htm

Myxomatosis

STB wrote: »

Anyone tried this ?

http://www.sesamtv.com/index_en.htm

Yeah, is very good compared to any other Media Center software.

Unfortunately, my DVB-T card is not supported at the moment, but my DVB-S card is. Works pretty well as far as I can remember.

If your willing to spend a bit of money, then SageTV is by far the best Media Center software I've used and I've tried them ALL!

Automatically records a channel when you begin to look at it so you can rewind, nice interface, really stable.

danIrl

I use GBPVR which is free to use. It has good support for DVB-S & T. It also has a good support forum. It does not look as well as some of the others, but it is very stable.