DTT with Windows 7?

mullingar

mullingar wrote: »

This is probably my problem too, I tried a HD4670 (fan is too noisy) and a HD4350 I had lying around on my ASUS P5Q-EM-DO and still problems with RTE.

I have ordered a passive cooled Nvidia 9500GT so Im hoping it will fix my problem!

I never knew graphic cards could be so fussy

I received my Gainward Passive 9500GT 1GB from Komplett yesterday and after a bit of driver problems (nVidia now have proper W7 drivers on their website) it works perfect!

In 7MC, DTT changes channel in about 1 second, followed by a bit of juddering for another second then perfect signal! The change from DTT to sat takes about 2 seconds, so I can easily live with that.

So anybody thinking of building a 7MC HTPC , GET A nVIDIA CARD!

Anybody want to buy a little used HD4670 1GB Card?


Edit:
Im having problems with the drivers as the pc wont start-up/shut-down/stand-by correctly. Time for a fresh insallto see if it fixes it

bazwaldo

stephene wrote: »

Yes, 1366x768 @ 60Hz is fine when you're using the desktop, but when you configure the TV resolution in Media Center Settings, you're specifically setting the resolution for the Media Center application, ie. Media Center will change to this resolution when it starts up, and revert back when you exit. All PAL tv broadcasts are 50Hz, so you should make sure that Media Center changes to this refresh rate after it starts up (usually the info button on your tv remote will tell you the current refresh rate). At 60Hz you will see frequent judder on news tickers and slow panning scenes. Go to the Sky News or BBC News channels and watch the news ticker at the bottom of the screen. At 60Hz it will judder, at 50Hz it will be smooth as silk.

Yeah, I spent ages months ago trying different resolutions and this week I've hit the jackpot. For some reason 720p is the only resolution which has the tickertapes with no judder and for reason has a better "TV" picture. The desktop is not as clear but not too noticable. I have it set to 50Hz and also tried 60Hz and I could not tell the difference. It could be that its not actually changing it so I must check that reg key listed earlier in the thread. My TV is 1360x768 so I would have expected that resolution to look best and it does for the desktop. 720p for TV though. As far as I can tell, that means upscalinng twice (by gfx card and by TV).

stephene wrote: »

There is not much on ITV-HD at the moment alright. Mainly FA cup and Champions league football as well as a few movies and dramas. You can manually add it by doing a single satellite transponder scan (can't remember what the freq is right now). The channel name is comes up as 10510 which I renamed to ITV-HD and used the option to copy the listings from ITV1 London to the ITV-HD channel so I can schedule something to record, but I need to know it's going to be on HD before hand.

Check out http://www.zingzing.co.uk, they are one of the few sites that provide listings for ITV-HD. Ooo, looks like "The Shadow" is on tonight at 11.05pm

Stephen.

I see Channel4 HD listed. I never noticed that in the MC guide. I'll confirm my ITV HD works tonight. Pity I could have watched Barca kick ManUs ass last night in HD had I thought of it.:D

mrbongo

One thing I've noticed on 50hz vs 60hz, is flicker when not in MCE.

The way to see this (more easily seen with a white screen) is to look at your TV/monitor indirectly (using your peripheral vision - so look away from the screen and concentrate on the screen in your peripheral vision). At 50hz you may notice a lot of flicker, which may subside or disappear at 60hz.

If there is noticeable flicker at 50hz then this is what your eye will actually see, although your brain might not notice, when looking at the screen straight on. It is harder on your eyes, higher refresh rates are easier on the eyes.

That's something I make sure to do on work monitors, push the refresh rate as high as it will go, your eyes will thank you in the long run.

stephene

mrbongo wrote: »

One thing I've noticed on 50hz vs 60hz, is flicker when not in MCE.

Absolutely, which is why Media Center allows you to configure the TV screen resolution specifically for the Media Center application, as I mentioned earlier, so you're not stuck using your TV resolution and refresh rate when you're not using Media Center.

So, when using normal desktop applications (ie. not Media Center fullscreen), whack the refresh rate up as high as your monitor/TV will support, and make sure you've configured Media Center to start up @50Hz. Media Center only allows you to specify a screen resolution through it's interface not the refresh rate. If it defaults to 60Hz as it does for me, you will need to use the registry hack outlined above to explicitly choose 50Hz.

BTW, I found that setting the RefreshRate registry value to 32 hex (50 decimal) did not work for my Samsung TV, however, setting it to 19 hex (25 decimal) successfully changed the TV refresh rate to 50Hz.

Stephen.

bazwaldo

Media Center lists the refresh rate too if you select the last entry in the list (List All Modes or something like it).

stephene

I have to admit I've never seen that "List all modes" option in the Media Center TV setup. I have seen it when changing the Windows screen resolution alright, but not in Media Center.

I must have a look for that when I get home

Stephen.

bazwaldo

stephene wrote: »

There is not much on ITV-HD at the moment alright. Mainly FA cup and Champions league football as well as a few movies and dramas. You can manually add it by doing a single satellite transponder scan (can't remember what the freq is right now). The channel name is comes up as 10510 which I renamed to ITV-HD and used the option to copy the listings from ITV1 London to the ITV-HD channel so I can schedule something to record, but I need to know it's going to be on HD before hand.

Check out http://www.zingzing.co.uk, they are one of the few sites that provide listings for ITV-HD. Ooo, looks like "The Shadow" is on tonight at 11.05pm

Stephen.

Put on channel 10510 last night and all I could get was sound (which sounded like a movie). The picture just displayed "Digital Audio Service". I can get BBC HD no problem so does that rule out the dish being misaligned. Is there something else I need to do? The 10510 channel was added after doing a full transponder scan. Any ideas?

mullingar

Back on topic.

I got DTT finally working in W7 nearly perfectly.

The problem was a combination of the BIOS firmware and the video card (now a nVidia 9600 GSO).

The last remaning issue is the DTT recordings.


Has anybody got DTT recordings playing back perfectly?

I only get sound, no picture in 7MC but if I play back the file in Media Player its perfect.

Wheeker

mrbongo wrote: »

Success!

A system restore got me back to BBC HD working (maybe the Core AVC install messed something up here).

Then I disabled DXVA as per Bazwaldo's suggestion and Irish DTT is coming in solid. Hopefully the ATI hardware acceleration problem will be fixed in the coming months, but for now this fix is looking decent for me.

TG4 is strangely blank when I tune to it, then after a minute it appears all of a sudden, rock solid.

Here's the DXVA disable registry settings again:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SCrunch\CodecPack\MSDVD]
"DXVA2"=dword:00000000
"DXVA"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SCrunch\CodecPack\MSDVD]
"DXVA2"=dword:00000000
"DXVA"=dword:00000000

Thanks for all the help people,
Cheers,
Mike

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I wonder if anyone (particularly mrbongo or Bazwaldo) can help me.

A while ago I upgraded to an ATI HD4550 Graphics card & I have been getting recurring corruption on the Irish DTT DVB-T channels i.e. stutters, pixelisation & green blocks. I have continually updated to the latest ATI CCC driver (currently on 10.10) & have noticed some improvement, however it still comes back every so often.

Various people say this is an issue with mpeg-4/h.264/DXVA decoding with ATI cards only (not Nvidia). Some people (incl. mrbongo above) recommend disabling hardware acceleration on the ATI card &/or disabling DXVA decoding (same thing?). Ok, not ideal as offloading decoding to the video card would keep my CPU usage down, but I'm willing to give it a go. However, I've no idea how to do this, where do I enter the "DXVA disable registry settings" above? I'm also wary of making any changes to the registry, how do you reverse this if needs be?

philahern

Have you considered it might just be a signal problem? There has been a lot of bad weather maybe your aerial has moved?

Wheeker

philahern wrote: »

Have you considered it might just be a signal problem? There has been a lot of bad weather maybe your aerial has moved?

Hmmm.... good point! As it happens I am only using a small stick aerial in my living room. I live in Dublin 12 & the reception seems to be absolutely perfect. I'm sure I read somewhere that DVB-T reception is either "on or off", either you get a perfect signal or you don't get any signal at all. Is this true?

Edit: BTW- W7 MC indicates signal strength to be 100%

Don't really want to go to the expense of installing an external or loft aerial with cabling if I don't have to.

The picture corruption I'm getting seems to be the same as others have described with ATI graphics cards, though maybe I'm over-complicating things

HLF

Did you get that sorted. My setup is a Shuttle SD11G5 with a Pinnacle 7010ix and a ATI HD 4550. I have this system for 5 years now starting with XP then Vista (Vista not so good, upgraded to try and get DTT a year back with the Pinnacle card, spent away too much time messing with it, TV packs - H264 etc.) However got Windows 7 yesterday and did a clean install. Only had to get the ATI Realtek HDMI drivers for the HD4550 to get 5.1 sound through the HDMI port. With in 3 hours of starting the install everything is working, Irish DTT, HD etc. no problems. Makes a change.
Note: the pixelisation might be caused by your graphics card overheating.

bazwaldo

Wheeker wrote: »

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I wonder if anyone (particularly mrbongo or Bazwaldo) can help me.

A while ago I upgraded to an ATI HD4550 Graphics card & I have been getting recurring corruption on the Irish DTT DVB-T channels i.e. stutters, pixelisation & green blocks. I have continually updated to the latest ATI CCC driver (currently on 10.10) & have noticed some improvement, however it still comes back every so often.

Various people say this is an issue with mpeg-4/h.264/DXVA decoding with ATI cards only (not Nvidia). Some people (incl. mrbongo above) recommend disabling hardware acceleration on the ATI card &/or disabling DXVA decoding (same thing?). Ok, not ideal as offloading decoding to the video card would keep my CPU usage down, but I'm willing to give it a go. However, I've no idea how to do this, where do I enter the "DXVA disable registry settings" above? I'm also wary of making any changes to the registry, how do you reverse this if needs be?

Looks like signal issues. I wouldnt trust the 100% MCE is reporting. There is no need to disable DXVA anymore as the ATI latest drivers fixed the problem with mpeg4.

Wheeker

Thanks for the replies guys, got me thinking that perhaps I was wrongly buying into an ATI-DTT conspiracy theory!

I bought an amplified indoor aerial to see if this helped http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Philex-SLx-GOLD-DigiTop-Amplified-Indoor-Caravan-Aerial-/270686638663?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3f062e5247

The picture seems perfect but then judders every now & again W7MC reports signal strength @ 60% then 100% then 70%, so I suppose I can't really trust the reports. Is there any other software I could use to monitor signal strength (I do have Compro DTV software I haven't installed so could try that I suppose).

Where to go from here? I could try to locate the indoor aerial closer to a window (will take a bit of work). However, other factors are now pushing me towards getting a satellite dish installed & cabled (to add Freesat to my HTPC ). So I may well get a loft aerial installed for DTT at the same time, just unsure if I really need or not

Wheeker

UPDATE: Got a high-gain loft aerial (& Sat dish) installed on Saturday, recorded the rugby on RTE2 DTT that night. The picture is absolutely perfect, then 20 mins in- really bad corruption again . I'm reaching the end of my tether here, was about to cut-the-cord on UPC to move to DTT+Freesat, but now I'm worried my DTT will be unwatchable :mad:. Updated ATI CCC driver to 10.12- recording still corrupted.

Not sure if it's only a problem with Recorded DTT rather than Live DTT. On watching Live DTT it seems fine. So what else can I try?

HLF wrote: »

Note: the pixelisation might be caused by your graphics card overheating.

Maybe- how can I tell? The ATI HD4550 card is passive so no fan, CCC doesn't seem to have a temp guage. Would I then need to install an extra fan?

Change the Video codec- maybe the default MS h.264 codec is the issue? Try Shark007 Codec pack?

TV Tuner card driver?

Last ditch- replace ATI card with an Nvidia GT220?

Any help would be really appreciated