DTT with Windows 7?

slegs · 12-05-2009 03:45PM

mullingar wrote: »

I installed Win7 on an older system (2ghz, 1gbram, 40gb IDE HD) and tried it with an USB Hauppauge HVR-900 (both analogue & dtt USB stick).

It WORKS with Irish DTT, Full EPG!!:D:D

(But picture kept stuttering due to low speed of system and built-in video card)

Same stick I am using for DTT (Hauppauge HVR-900) along with a TechnoTrend Budget 1500 PCI card for DVB-S. My PC is a relatively new Core2Duo CPU with a good spec ATI card.

Will do a little more playing tonight and report back on stability as I only played with it for 30mins after setting up before.

fat-tony · 12-05-2009 04:49PM

bazwaldo wrote: »

Fat Tony, if you are using the PowerDVD decoder which can use DXVA, is your GFX card nvidia? As the RTE h.264 problem seems to exist in ATI cards only. Hence having to turn off DXVA if the selected decoder tries to make use of the gfx card.

The default MS decoder in Vista and Win7 uses DXVA. On XP, there isn't an MS decoder.

I don't have a separate graphics card. It's the same mobo as mrbongo's, which has ATI graphics on-board with H.264 decoding. DXVA is enabled in the PowerDVD decoder which offloads to the on-chip decoding. I'm aware that XP has no MPEG4 decoder supplied by MS. You have to have a third-party solution - either one which uses CPU (like CoreAVC or similar) or one which can offload to the GPU, like Cyberlink. It works perfectly for me with DVBviewer with less than 10% CPU utilisation on RTE/TG4 and 1% on the TV3 testcard:)
Watty's point with regard to Win7 is valid. It's in beta and you are going to have issues with video when the software is oriented typically to a U.S. user who is not going to be experimenting with DVB-T and MPEG4/H.264
Win XP is rock solid with appropriate viewers and codecs.

bazwaldo · 12-05-2009 05:59PM

fat-tony wrote: »

I don't have a separate graphics card. It's the same mobo as mrbongo's, which has ATI graphics on-board with H.264 decoding. DXVA is enabled in the PowerDVD decoder which offloads to the on-chip decoding. I'm aware that XP has no MPEG4 decoder supplied by MS. You have to have a third-party solution - either one which uses CPU (like CoreAVC or similar) or one which can offload to the GPU, like Cyberlink. It works perfectly for me with DVBviewer with less than 10% CPU utilisation on RTE/TG4 and 1% on the TV3 testcard:)
Watty's point with regard to Win7 is valid. It's in beta and you are going to have issues with video when the software is oriented typically to a U.S. user who is not going to be experimenting with DVB-T and MPEG4/H.264
Win XP is rock solid with appropriate viewers and codecs.

Interesting.... Maybe the problem is not with the ATI dxva after all. I'm happy enough to plug away with Win7 and will switch back to Vista when RC expires. Whenever I get my aerial and hook it up, I can report back. It'll be a while though.

I had Cyperlinks decoder way back before Vista came out. I doubt that one would work with h.264. I assume its been updated in the past 4 years for this and whatever else.

12-05-2009 06:03PM

Karsini wrote: »

Do you have an ATI video card by any chance? I've had big trouble getting hardware accelerated H.264 working on ATI cards, usually stuttery video or just a green screen.

Make sure if You are using Vista that Aero interface is turned on.For some reason when this is turned off,hardware acceleration doesnt work properly.

12-05-2009 07:13PM

bazwaldo wrote: »

Interesting.... Maybe the problem is not with the ATI dxva after all. I'm happy enough to plug away with Win7 and will switch back to Vista when RC expires. Whenever I get my aerial and hook it up, I can report back. It'll be a while though.

I noticed with the Cyberlink codecs that I needed to use V9 on ATI in order to get hardware acceleration working. I was previously using 7.3's codecs and had the same green screen problem. This is under XP so it's not specifically an OS issue.

Windows Media Player in Windows 7 is currently locked to use its own codecs only, however I've heard that this is only for testing and the final release will be unlocked like previous versions.

Zyaire Fat Salesman wrote: »

Make sure if You are using Vista that Aero interface is turned on.For some reason when this is turned off,hardware acceleration doesnt work properly.

I don't use Vista, only XP on my end.

fat-tony · 12-05-2009 07:52PM

Its PowerDVD9 I'm using - there's no way a four-year old version of PowerDVD could be supporting hardware H.264 - it's only out on the ATI cards since about 2006.

12-05-2009 07:54PM

fat-tony wrote: »

Its PowerDVD9 I'm using - there's no way a four-year old version of PowerDVD could be supporting hardware H.264 - it's only out on the ATI cards since about 2006.

7.3 works on the 8800GT in my desktop.

mrbongo · 12-05-2009 08:48PM

@watty: part of the advantage of a PC setup is that as things change, you can easily add a new (hopefully cheap) dedicated tuner card, e.g. DVB-S2, and begin using that along with all other tuners. Windows 7 MCE has much better support for this over XP.

The decoder can be easily changed from MS's on Windows 7 using MCDU.

@bazwaldo: tried the registry settings for switching off hardware acceleration, didn't help me. In fact, even reversing my changes, I've now buggered BBC HD, so that isn't displaying any more, sheesh!

Hmmm, maybe one of my other changes messed up H264 coding and if I get BBC HD back, I'll get Irish DTT too ... who knows.

@fat-tony: re advantages of MCE
- It has the best and most detailed EPG with 'series linking' that I have seen (14 days, lots of program detail) and ability to, e.g., record from analog RTE if digital RTE signal is not found
- Full 10 foot interface for doing everything via remote, tuning, scanning, organising EPG, configuring etc.
- Handles DVD playing, AVI, MKV etc video
- Music centre
- Photo centre
- Very reliable programmed recording
There's no need for a keyboard and there's no tweaking of MCE to be done outside of MCE (except for initial setup of course). I have used DVBViewer and MediaPortal, plus various set-top box UIs, and MCE is more feature rich and easier to use I find.

On sound/video quality my sound output is digital from PC to digital amp, can't get much better. Video output is better than my NTL box and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from my Sky HD box.

mrbongo · 13-05-2009 12:01AM

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

bazwaldo · 13-05-2009 07:21AM

Phew!!!!

:) What decoder are you using now then?

mrbongo · 13-05-2009 07:45AM

It's the default MS decoder. The registry settings above are the only tweak needed. Performance is fine on Irish DTT, and on BBC HD.

Checked TG4 this morning, still the same. When I switch to it, screen is black for around a minute, then it comes on all of a sudden, and stays on, rock solid. Very odd.

bazwaldo · 13-05-2009 07:57AM

Cool. I wonder what the difference between DXVA and DXVA2 are. As turning it off will mean that the mpeg2 decoding will also be done my the MS decoder. It would be nice if it were possible to turn off DXVA just for h.264.

Hopefully its only temporary anyway and whatever bug it is gets fixed before release of Win7.

EDIT: info on dxva1 and dxva2 here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307941(VS.85).aspx

mrbongo · 13-05-2009 08:20AM

Now that digital is working, I've a tuning problem with MCE.

I want to tune in both analog and digital Irish channels, so that I get TV3 and the analog is there as backup if digital transmission is interrupted.

But although in TV Setup I can choose to setup both analog and digital tuners on the Pinnacle card, it only actually tunes in the digital channels at the tuning stage and there's only 1 entry per Irish channel in the guide.

Tuning analog on its own works, tuning digital on its own works, tuning both only gives digital.

bazwaldo · 13-05-2009 08:35AM

If Win7 (Or Vista with TVPack) recognises that the channel is the same from 2 sources, it merges them into one guide entry. Hit "Info" on the channel within the guide and select edit channel source (or something like that). From there you can either split the channels to separate the sources, or change the priority (digital first if available, then analogue if not for instance).

This option is also available from the Guide settings. Edit Channels.

mrbongo · 13-05-2009 09:24AM

That is an excellent feature. Have that setup now. Disabled digital for TV3 and the other three digital channels are automatically backed up with the analog version, if there's ever a transmission problem, slick.

Many thanks Bazwaldo.

13-05-2009 03:57PM

Karsini wrote: »

I noticed with the Cyberlink codecs that I needed to use V9 on ATI in order to get hardware acceleration working. I was previously using 7.3's codecs and had the same green screen problem. This is under XP so it's not specifically an OS issue.

Windows Media Player in Windows 7 is currently locked to use its own codecs only, however I've heard that this is only for testing and the final release will be unlocked like previous versions.

I don't use Vista, only XP on my end.

There is your problem.The ATI H.264 hardware acceleration only works properly with windows vista EVR.
(Enhanced Video Renderer) .

13-05-2009 07:09PM

Zyaire Fat Salesman wrote: »

There is your problem.The ATI H.264 hardware acceleration only works properly with windows vista EVR.
(Enhanced Video Renderer) .

Not true, it works with PowerDVD 9's codecs on XP, it just didn't work with 7.3's. (in my case 3% CPU with DxVA enabled on SD material, 12% without). Still, I find ATI to be inferior to NVIDIA in every way except reliability - the H.264 acceleration is a pain and anti-aliasing doesn't work as well. I only got an ATI-based laptop due to the risk of an NVIDIA card failing because of the bad bumps issue.

fat-tony · 13-05-2009 11:52PM

Karsini wrote: »

7.3 works on the 8800GT in my desktop.

Yes - but I don't think 7.3 has been around for four years - or has it - that's what I thought was mentioned

The Purevideo HD acceleration is only around since 2006 or early 2007 or am I mixing it up with some other go-faster technology?:)

fat-tony · 14-05-2009 12:01AM

mrbongo wrote: »

@fat-tony: re advantages of MCE
- It has the best and most detailed EPG with 'series linking' that I have seen (14 days, lots of program detail) and ability to, e.g., record from analog RTE if digital RTE signal is not found
- Full 10 foot interface for doing everything via remote, tuning, scanning, organising EPG, configuring etc.
- Handles DVD playing, AVI, MKV etc video
- Music centre
- Photo centre
- Very reliable programmed recording
There's no need for a keyboard and there's no tweaking of MCE to be done outside of MCE (except for initial setup of course). I have used DVBViewer and MediaPortal, plus various set-top box UIs, and MCE is more feature rich and easier to use I find.

Cheers - thanks for that mrbongo. I'm happy enough with DVBviewer for the mo' as it has the Freesat EPG and supports the Irish DTT 7 day EPG. The "lean back" (or 10 foot) interface leaves a lot to be desired as I couldn't find anyway to use a standard IR remote with the Technisat card, just the limited one (in terms of the number of buttons) supplied. I couldn't get the Technisat IR receiver dongle to work at all with the standard drivers for the Pinnacle card and I wasn't prepared to download and install the Pinnacle viewer application.
Maybe I might try MCE on XP - how do you connect the IR dongle on your setup?

mullingar · 15-05-2009 04:06PM

slegs wrote: »

Same stick I am using for DTT (Hauppauge HVR-900) along with a TechnoTrend Budget 1500 PCI card for DVB-S. My PC is a relatively new Core2Duo CPU with a good spec ATI card.

Will do a little more playing tonight and report back on stability as I only played with it for 30mins after setting up before.

@ Slegs,

I am still building my HTPC:
- ASUS P5Q-EM
- E5200 (2x2.5ghz) Intel dual core
- ATI RADEON HD 4670 1024MB
- 2GB Ram/ 1TB HDD

Anyway, I am still waining for delivery of a Pinnacle 7010ix, but for the moment I am testing the DTT with the Hauppage PVR-900.

Have you played back any of your recorded DTT shows? I am getting sound but no picture. Its work perfect on analogue playback.
The recorded TV shows play back perfect in MS Media Player, maybe codec problem?

Can you check you setup slegs?

Thanks

mrbongo · 15-05-2009 04:12PM

Don't know if it will help mullingar but I've installed the codec pack from Shark007, has worked good for me playing videos (mkv, avi, divx, xvid etc):
http://shark007.net/win7codecs.html

I would've thought these wouldn't be used playing back recorded tv though, since the MS Video Decoder would be what's used.

mullingar · 15-05-2009 04:40PM

Everything else works perfectly and 7MC decodes everything I have thrown at it, all except playing back Irish DTT recordings.

(I have tried shark007, but 7MC's codecs are *locked* (I also tried MCDU))

mrbongo · 15-05-2009 04:45PM

Have you hardware acceleration disabled? I see you're an ATI user

stephene · 19-05-2009 02:57PM

I've been using 7MC since the first public beta (7000), and after going through 3 different motherboards with onboard graphics, I finally found a hardware combination that works for me.

I have a Silverstone slimline HTPC case so I needed a mATX board with onboard graphics as the only available PCIe slot was going to be used by the tv tuner.

I started out with the popular AMD 780G based motherboard with onboard ATI HD3200 graphics. This worked perfectly for all DVB-S channels including BBC-HD and ITV-HD but the ATI driver issue with Irish DTT was the sticking point. I temporarily installed an NVIDIA 9500GT into the 780G just as a test (disabling onboard graphics), and the DTT channels displayed perfectly.

So, now I knew I needed a mATX motherboard with onboard NVIDIA graphics.
My current setup is the following:

Silverstone ML02-BXR case
ASUS M3N78-EM AM2/AM2+ motherboard with onboard NVIDIA 8300
AMD 4850e 2x2.5Ghz 45W CPU
WD Scorpio 2.5" 500GB hard disk
Blackgold BGT3540 6 in 1 tuner
Windows 7 RC (7100)

And it all pretty much works out of the box. The only things I have to do after installing the Blackgold drivers and going through the media center tv tuner setup, is to fix the EPG sources for Channel 4 and Five so the listings appear for them, and once I've chosen 1920x1080i as the screen resolution in the media center TV configuration, I need to manually set the refresh rate to 50Hz via the registry as it seems to always default to 60Hz for me.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DisplayService]
"RefreshRate"=dword:00000032

As a bit of a stress test, I tried recording from both DVB-T tuners and 1 DVB-S tuner simultaneously while watching BBC-HD live on the 1 remaining DVB-S tuner. It worked perfectly, not a skip or a judder in sight!

Finally Windows Media Center has come of age (if you have the right hardware that is

)

Stephen.

bazwaldo · 19-05-2009 04:39PM

Nice one Stephen! How did you get the listings for Channel 5?

And whats your TV resolution? I'm curious as to your reasons for picking 1080i.

stephene · 19-05-2009 05:52PM

bazwaldo wrote: »

Nice one Stephen! How did you get the listings for Channel 5?

This is from memory so it might not be 100% accurate. I think you can right click on the channel name in the Guide (or select the channel name with the remote and press i). This should pop up a menu. Choose Edit Listings, type in f i v e. You should be scrolled to a channel named five (in lower case), when you select it you should see a guide listing below the list. Click save and you're done. Do the same for Channel 4 and Channel 4+1 (except type c h a n

). If you could be bothered, you might need to do it for some of the ITV +1 channels too.

And whats your TV resolution? I'm curious as to your reasons for picking 1080i.

BBC HD and ITV HD broadcast in 1080i, so it's the native resolution for those channels and they seem to look best at that resolution. The SD 576i channels seem to get scaled up quite nicely with no noticeable artifacts. All "HD Ready" tellys can do 1080i.

bazwaldo · 20-05-2009 08:30AM

I've been using 1366x768 60Hz as my resolution because the interface and windows itself displays perfectly. Very crisp. If I change to any other resolution, that crispness disappears but the picture changes in contrast it seems. Whites being very bright in particular. I'll play around a bit more when I get a chance.

And cheers for the info on Five etc. Seems to be a case issue with the channel name as to why it does not find Five (as opposed to five) in the guide. I've never got anything to display on itv HD. I believe the channel is listed as some number 10??? but all I get is a Digital Audio channel. Is that right?

mullingar · 20-05-2009 09:25AM

stephene wrote: »

I started out with the popular AMD 780G based motherboard with onboard ATI HD3200 graphics. This worked perfectly for all DVB-S channels including BBC-HD and ITV-HD but the ATI driver issue with Irish DTT was the sticking point. I temporarily installed an NVIDIA 9500GT into the 780G just as a test (disabling onboard graphics), and the DTT channels displayed perfectly.

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

stephene · 20-05-2009 11:26AM

bazwaldo wrote: »

I've been using 1366x768 60Hz as my resolution because the interface and windows itself displays perfectly. Very crisp. If I change to any other resolution, that crispness disappears but the picture changes in contrast it seems. Whites being very bright in particular. I'll play around a bit more when I get a chance.

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.

bazwaldo wrote: »

I've never got anything to display on itv HD. I believe the channel is listed as some number 10??? but all I get is a Digital Audio channel. Is that right?

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.

mullingar · 20-05-2009 12:19PM

The ITV-HD guide is also on the freesat.co.uk site:

http://www.freesat.co.uk/index.php?page=whatson.HDschedule

It highlights the shameful attempt of ITV calling it a 'channel' as it only tramsnits a handful of programmes a week

DTT with Windows 7?

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