Media PC

karltimber

I have 10 avi movie clip files in one folder.

MCE sees them all but only recognises 3 of them.
Plays the 3 as movies and the other 7 as sound files.

how can this be fixed.

thx

SouperComputer

karltimber wrote:

I have 10 avi movie clip files in one folder.

MCE sees them all but only recognises 3 of them.
Plays the 3 as movies and the other 7 as sound files.

how can this be fixed.

thx

what are the codecs of the other files? Do they open in media player?

You can check what codec they use by using a program called gspot.

the_tractor

Hi,
I am having a few problems with the EPG on my Media Center PC.

I live in the North, and can receive the following channels.

BBC1/2, ITV, Ch4&5, RTE1&2, TV3 and TG4.

I have a aerial on the roof, and have an analogue TV Card, MCE150 I think.

I have used SoSolids info on setting up the EPG,
i.e. Region set to UK, Cable or Digital Cable, Cable line-up for the UK etc.

I now have the EPG for all channels except TV3 and TG4.
Is it possible to get EPG info for these channels?

I have tried to set my region to Ireland, but it then asks me for an area code or something - What should I put in here?
Whatever I have tried, it keeps saying no Info for your country or region.

Is it possible to get EPG for TV3/TG4 in the UK region, or do I need to set the Region to Ireland? And if region is Ireland what do I need to set.

I have Windoze AutoUpdate so I assume I have Rollup2.

Any help greatly apprectiated!

SouperComputer

I have Windoze AutoUpdate so I assume I have Rollup2.

Rollup2 is an optional update, you may need to manually install it.

the_tractor

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

Checking the MS website - it says about Rollup2:
"This will appear as a recommended download for Media Center Edition 2005 in Windows Update."

I have always selected the recommended install so i assume I do have it, but is there any way to check that it is actually installed?

Stephen

SouperComputer

you can lookup your update history .................

the_tractor

Thanks for that Info!

I have never looked too much into the auto update thingy. I have always just accepted the recommended updates.

I did not have Rollup2.
I do now( plus the update for Rollup2! )

I don't seem to be having any problems (new ones anyway ) since the update.

But I have spent most of the weekend trying different TV setups to try and get the complete guide.
I have tried just about every county in the listings area setup screen, but I cannot get the setting I need.

I have an aerial on the roof and pick up the following analogue channels
BBC1/BBC2/ITV1/Ch4/Ch5/RTE1/RTE2/TV3/TG4.

However I only have guide listings for
BBC1/BBC2/ITV1/Ch4/Ch5/RTE1/RTE2 - that is using SoSolids setup tip earlier in this thread. (Analogue Cable UK setup) - Using Analogue listing set up I only get
BBC1/BBC2/ITV1/Ch4/Ch5.

Is there anyway I can get all my channels using the MCE guide?

Please help:(
Stephen.

secret_squirrel

Did you try digital cable in the MCE set up certainly in dublin the channels are a superset of the analog ones. Therefore you can get extra channels. Note Im talking about just the guide setup, not your tuner setup.

All the channels you list except Ch5 from memory are available on the Dublin Digital and Dublin Analog cable settings.

You might just have to face it though that you'll either have to give up one or more guide channels. I cant get a guide for eurosport for example.

One other thought occurs. You are adding any missing channel names manually arent you? And then manually matching them to the guide channel of the similar name. I know MCE tries to pick up the channel name from Teletext or similar, but it only automatically assigned guide channels to about 1/2 of mine. I have to give the channel a name, then manually select the correct guide listing for it.

Dave Sully

here is my home setup, made this dagram for a few friends that I am doing installs for

the_tractor

secret_squirrel wrote:

Did you try digital cable in the MCE set up certainly in dublin the channels are a superset of the analog ones. Therefore you can get extra channels. Note Im talking about just the guide setup, not your tuner setup.

All the channels you list except Ch5 from memory are available on the Dublin Digital and Dublin Analog cable settings.

You might just have to face it though that you'll either have to give up one or more guide channels. I cant get a guide for eurosport for example.

One other thought occurs. You are adding any missing channel names manually arent you? And then manually matching them to the guide channel of the similar name. I know MCE tries to pick up the channel name from Teletext or similar, but it only automatically assigned guide channels to about 1/2 of mine. I have to give the channel a name, then manually select the correct guide listing for it.

Hi,
I don't actually have to add the channel names. It adds them automatically - even TG4 - well it gives it the old name T.na G..

I will try the Dublin Cable/Analogue set up, but I think I watch Ch5 more than TG4/TV3 - can't remember the last time I watched TV3, so I might have to live with it - or else go the XML TV guide route or whatever.

Who oh Why could they not just make it more configurable - so you could assign any channel listing you want to any channel you have.
That would make it so much easier.

RuggieBear

I thought you could assign any channel listing to any channel....when i set up mine the other day i think i had the option.

i couldn't figure out how to connect the ntl digital box to the tv card and get it to work with mce...so ended up just using the analoge cable

secret_squirrel

RuggieBear wrote:

I thought you could assign any channel listing to any channel....

The list of guide channels is limited by the region and the signal type you select in guide setup. You can only get the guide channels microsoft have pre-listed for your area.

I must go back and have a play and see if I can get the guide channels for sky ireland, that might give me back Eurosport at the expense of TG4 and TV3.

Why could they not just make it more configurable

Agreed. It wouldnt have cost them much to create a massive master list of all possible uk/ireland/europe channels. Even if it was a pain to set up it would have been worth it for flexibility.

RuggieBear

secret_squirrel wrote:

Agreed. It wouldnt have cost them much to create a massive master list of all possible uk/ireland/europe channels. Even if it was a pain to set up it would have been worth it for flexibility.

yeah i was just thinking that this evening as i had to rescan everything in again.....not enough options to correct the silly automated processes

vibe666

i thought i might share this with you, as setting up my tv card in mce was almost impossible to do easily with the options they give you.

I stumbled across this on the net: http://mceguider.oabsoftware.nl/index.php?MainURL=body-download.htm

it's called mce guider, and it's designed for dutch people to sort out wonky channels in their mce guide.

it's far from a polished perfect tool for anyone to use, but what it does do is give you a way to easily add/remove channels from the guide and then assign custom frequencies to those channels.

my problem was that although i could download the correct guide for my tv package (ntl analogue dublin), it was not letting me scan for channels once that was done, and therefore didn't have any of the channels at all.

what i did was ran through the correct channel setup in mce to get the channel listing, then closed mce and ran mce guider and took all the frequency listings from the ntl ireland website and manually entered them for each channel.

mce guider also gives you a much easier option for changing channel order than you get in mce, if you want to group your channels a particular way for whatever reason.

downsides? the frequency is in hz, not mhz in guider and so you need to add '000000' to the end of every frequency listed on the ntl website as they're all listed in mhz. also, it sets your location in the guide to holland, which although it doesn't seem to affect picking up the channel listings, it'll probably drive any perfectionists out there bonkers for not being 100% correct.

just thought i'd share that for anyone else having problems.

some of the frequencies are slightly out though, due to ntl's famous channel drift, but i'm not sure if there's a way to manually fine tune the channels in mce to get the best signal.

does anyone know how to do this?

RuggieBear

vibe666 wrote:

i thought i might share this with you, as setting up my tv card in mce was almost impossible to do easily with the options they give you.


just thought i'd share that for anyone else having problems.

some of the frequencies are slightly out though, due to ntl's famous channel drift, but i'm not sure if there's a way to manually fine tune the channels in mce to get the best signal.

does anyone know how to do this?

That sums up my problems. A few times i've ended up with over 290 frequencies picked up and then it's impossible to move the ones you want up to the top as you can only move a channel up one space at a time.....:( which is maddening. I end up just deleting it all and starting again, and again till it somehow picks up the 17 channels i have

vibe666

hmmm. can't find anything on fine tuning the signal on the net, so we might be stuck Ruggie.

unless someone can come up with exact frequencies so we can edit them manually with mce guider.

EDIT: does anyone have another TV app that works with MCE cards and has exact freqencies listed? if we know exaclty what to put into the guider freq. box we should be able to get around the problem.

SouperComputer

EDIT: does anyone have another TV app that works with MCE cards and has exact freqencies listed? if we know exaclty what to put into the guider freq. box we should be able to get around the problem.

IIRC I used media portal to do that.

Wavey

Afternoon all,

After many, many teething problems with my HTPC build i finally got to the stage where i was ready to try recording one channel while watching another.

So I went back and ran the set up for 2 tuners (PVR500mce) and tried it.

It will start recording ok but as soon as i hit the Channel up button the pc locks up, needing a a hard restart.

I have the latest drivers for the pvr500.

Another problem that occurs sometimes is that the pc will boot in 16bit mode. I have read that this is beacuse the PVR500 and my 6800gt are sharing some irq resouces. Could this have anything to do with the lockup?

2.6 P4
1 gig ram
Abit IS7
XFX 6800GT

Can anyone help me?

Thanks

Wavey

Krusty_Clown

Wavey wrote:

It will start recording ok but as soon as i hit the Channel up button the pc locks up, needing a a hard restart.

Definitely sounds like shared resources problems.. Long shot, but have you tried an alternative MPEG decoder? Which are you using? nVidia's Pure Video?

SouperComputer

sounds nasty wavey.

have you tried shifting IRQ's in either BIOS or device manager? You can of course free up some IRQs by disabling COM ports or whatnot if yoiu aint using them.

How are you for chipset drivers and BIOS updates?

Wavey

Thanks for the replies lads,

Came home this evening and the problem has dissapeared . I can now change channel while recording.

I checked the gfx card and the tv card for conflicts in device manager but none were listed.

I know squat about irq's. Do the alocated resources change every time you boot up?, therefore making it an intermittant problem?

As for chipset and bios, everything is up to date. And I am using Power DVD as a decoder. I tried Vnidia this evening to see if the picture quality was any better but they seem the same to me. (Grainy picture on most ntl analogue channels).

Is there any way to adjust the capture and encoder settings in real time? Its very hard to fine tune the pic when u have to keep restart MCE for the chages to take effect?

Cheers
Wavey

secret_squirrel

Wavey wrote:

Is there any way to adjust the capture and encoder settings in real time?

Ironically thats the only way you can do it with the purevideo decoder.

However I reinstalled my PVR and 6600GT and Mpeg2 decoder last week due to stuttering issues and replaced purevideo with copy of PowerDVD that came ironically with the 6600GT. Have compared powerdvd Purevide and I would say that the picture is as good as PureVideo except maybe a little softer, whereas Purevideo is much sharper - almost too sharp, actors and cartoons especially seem to 'float' over the background. Bear in mind Im also on a fairly crappy Chorus Analog connection. I've left PowerDVD at the default settings.

But main thing is no more stutter! So Im not going to chance it coming back by reinstalling PureVideo

spartacus93

Hi,

Ok so i've most things set up on media centre 05. Whats the story with fast forwarding DivX files? Why doesn't this work. Does anyone know a way around it.

Assuming that doesn't work, what's the best way to put my DVDs onto Media Centre?

Thanks

RuggieBear

spartacus93 wrote:

Hi,

Ok so i've most things set up on media centre 05. Whats the story with fast forwarding DivX files? Why doesn't this work. Does anyone know a way around it.

Assuming that doesn't work, what's the best way to put my DVDs onto Media Centre?

Thanks

you can't fast forward them...

SouperComputer

as ruggie said, you cant FFwd DivX in MCE It can be done in media player fine though.

Heres a good plugin for DVD's though: http://www.mymovies.name/

spartacus93

SouperComputer wrote:

as ruggie said, you cant FFwd DivX in MCE It can be done in media player fine though.

Strange, I thought they used the same engine

SouperComputer wrote:

Heres a good plugin for DVD's though: http://www.mymovies.name/

Excellent link, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a Million

FrankGrimes

my EPG went haywire over the weekend - all the channels out of sync for some mad reason. I had to spend 40 minutes sorting it all out again.

Is there any way I can save my file with the correct settings and just overwrite the messed up one with this master file next time it goes beserk? Or is somehow built into the registry or something that would stop me from being able to do this? Seems like itd be an easy fix for MS to avoid us all having to redo the file whenever the EPG goes wrong.

RuggieBear

FrankGrimes wrote:

my EPG went haywire over the weekend - all the channels out of sync for some mad reason. I had to spend 40 minutes sorting it all out again.

Is there any way I can save my file with the correct settings and just overwrite the messed up one with this master file next time it goes beserk? Or is somehow built into the registry or something that would stop me from being able to do this? Seems like itd be an easy fix for MS to avoid us all having to redo the file whenever the EPG goes wrong.

i believe its in the reg...think i aw a solution on www.thegreenbutton.com

i hate the the lack of control afforded, vaguely experienced computer users, in mce

Smoggy

Mines gone tits up 3 times, If I had a clue I would install a linux based one , as MS has pissed me off one to many times with media center

secret_squirrel

Mines done it once. I have a ghost backup now but its a bit overkill just for the guide change! If I had Sky and all its channels set up it might be different.