Yeah, if I was just using my PC for home theatre I'd totally go the nvidia route too. $100 for a new card would be a small price to pay to fix the issues I have with my ati card. Problem is, I've already spent all this money on my card ($450) and I love being able to play games on my tv too... played through prince of persia on max settings, 1080p, and it was just amazing. To get that with an Nvidia card I'd have to spend a similar amount again and it seems like such a waste!
I guess I just have to hope some of the windows 7 drivers will deal with the issue soon, or an option to use software decoding presents itself in windows 7...
I feel for you. Its rubbish when you put down that much cash and then run into probelms like this. Still, I'm glad you're enjoying the games on 1080P :-)
Windows 7 sounds like it will be pretty good. Any things you particularly like or dislike about it (apart from not having everything complete as its still in testing)?
Hopefully this 8500GT I am getting will do the job. I was considering getting a 9400GT as its a newer gen card but I got the 8500GT for $61 (plus postage) so couldn't warrant the extra money on a slightly updated card.
I'm loving windows 7. There are still a few kinks, but less than I would have expected in an OS beta. I mean, it's already better than vista in many respects and I don't even hate vista. One of the main problems I've been having is that many programs work in win7 beta, but don't work flawlessly. For instance, I couldn't alt+tab back into prince of persia, and not all programs respond cooperatively if I try to close them externally (e.g. if I'm alt+tabbed out of a game and I try to close it by right clickin on it and then clicking close). Mostly pretty minor stuff, apart from the graphics/DVB issues I have (which apparently pre-date this OS anyway and will hopefully be dealt with this year...)
I just thought i should post this to clarify this issue. The issue isnt that ATI cards have problems decoding H264. Almost all discrete ATI cards (3xxx+ cards) can do it including the 780G. The problem is that the microsoft codec that comes with tv pack and win 7 isnt fully compatible. However if u use media portal with powerdvd 8 codecs u get around 5% cpu usage on tv3, and no visual problems either but if u swhitch to media center ur cpu usage goes up and u also get sum viual problems. Its all down to how the codec interfaces with directx (only way to get dxva in vista or win7). That being said win7 x86 has sumwhat less problems with dxva than the x64 counterpart due to lack of 64 bit codecs.
PS I havent try other codecs but i remember that the powerdvd7 codec also had some problems. maybe other codecs do too but i know that for my 780g (3200HD) powerdvd 8 works well with freeview hd and also with 1080p bluray.
fieryblast: I just thought i should post this to clarify this issue. The issue isnt that ATI cards have problems decoding H264. Almost all discrete ATI cards (3xxx+ cards) can do it including the 780G. The problem is that the microsoft codec that comes with tv pack and win 7 isnt fully compatible. However if u use media portal with powerdvd 8 codecs u get around 5% cpu usage on tv3, and no visual problems either but if u swhitch to media center ur cpu usage goes up and u also get sum viual problems. Its all down to how the codec interfaces with directx (only way to get dxva in vista or win7). That being said win7 x86 has sumwhat less problems with dxva than the x64 counterpart due to lack of 64 bit codecs.
PS I havent try other codecs but i remember that the powerdvd7 codec also had some problems. maybe other codecs do too but i know that for my 780g (3200HD) powerdvd 8 works well with freeview hd and also with 1080p bluray.
I just tried that, and to my surprise it worked. I assumed that since the green blocks problem has been around so long that if I was encountering it in windows 7 then it probably wasn't fixed on any platform. Sure, it's a beta OS but it seemed a bit... coincidental for the exact same problem to be cropping up again after ATI had fixed it!
But you're right. Media portal and my 4870 are taking care of all the freeview channels fine now. I'm at about 5% CPU usage. Just need to iron out a few kinks and I should be good!
Hmm, might try this again then- although I couldn't get it working the first time.
But it may be the codecs I was using, I have now removed everything except PDVD8 codecs. If I can't get it going well then I'll stick with the 8500GT (still no hardware acceleration with this though!).
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if you had issues using onboard video to decode freeview regardless of the manufacturer - from what I've heard they just aren't powerful enough yet. But yeah, if you got that 4550 you were talking about, then after the reported success by myself and others in this thread, I'd expect it should work fine with a bit of fiddling around!
That's not to say I'd recommend buying ati if you haven't already. I still can't watch freeview properly in windows 7 - the green blocks issue has once again reared its ugly head on that platform, and we have no guarantees that ATI will fix it before the OS is released!
Oh, and make sure that you tell media portal to use the powerdvd codecs (I think it might use ffdshow by default otherwise).
780G uses the same video decoder as the 4800 series cards, look it up on the web. As for windows media center theres almost nothing you could do to change the h264 codecs it uses therefore even if it works well in media portal theres no guarantee its gonna work in wmc.
I wasn't suggesting that it didn't support it on paper, I meant that I doubted it would be powerful enough to do it well. Similar to the fact that my old Geforce 8600GT technically supported dx10 and the advanced effects it provides, including improved smoke and water, etc., yet that didn't mean I was actually able to take advantage of all the advanced effects in any game I played. Everything that I'd read on these forums up until this thread had suggested that there isn't yet an integrated video solution that is quite good enough to do the job well - they are almost powerful enough, but not quite.
Then again, this review (plus fiery's feedback) suggests that the 780G might actually be powerful enough http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2008/03/04/amd_780g_integrated_graphics_chipset/1 . Note however that the performance isn't on the same level as what you'd expect with a standalone video card. They are getting like 20% CPU usage. It looks like it's up to the job for sure, but its not like they are getting 5% CPU usage.
For some reason I assumed Elkano was using Media Portal and that's what I was referring to in my post about codecs above.. is he using WMC? I tend to read and reply to the latest post or two, forgetting what was said earlier in the thread : )
psk20: I wasn't suggesting that it didn't support it on paper, I meant that I doubted it would be powerful enough to do it well. Similar to the fact that my old Geforce 8600GT technically supported dx10 and the advanced effects it provides, including improved smoke and water, etc., yet that didn't mean I was actually able to take advantage of all the advanced effects in any game I played. Everything that I'd read on these forums up until this thread had suggested that there isn't yet an integrated video solution that is quite good enough to do the job well - they are almost powerful enough, but not quite.
Then again, this review (plus fiery's feedback) suggests that the 780G might actually be powerful enough http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2008/03/04/amd_780g_integrated_graphics_chipset/1 . Note however that the performance isn't on the same level as what you'd expect with a standalone video card. They are getting like 20% CPU usage. It looks like it's up to the job for sure, but its not like they are getting 5% CPU usage.
For some reason I assumed Elkano was using Media Portal and that's what I was referring to in my post about codecs above.. is he using WMC? I tend to read and reply to the latest post or two, forgetting what was said earlier in the thread : )
I'm using MediaPortal on XP SP3. Originally I was trying to to run the onboard radeon HD 3200 from my motherboard with PDVD8 codec, CCC 9.1 ATI drivers and was getting hardware decoding but green blocks on tv3 and switching problems as well. I then switched to a 8500GT which also had some issues and hardware decoding is still not working. I removed ffdshow and the issues resolved themselves (apart from hardware decoding), so I wonder if ffdshow could also have been the issue with the 3200.
So my next steps will be to retry the 3200 with only PDVD8 codecs installed, if that doesn't work I'll try a complete reinstall with the 8500GT (really want the hardware decoding to be working!).
Just a hunch, but have you tried disabling onboard video in the BIOS when you're using the 8500? Reading that review, it seems that the 780G has some funny setting that allows you to use the integrated graphics and your pcie card at the same time, in a weird kind of crossfire-mode. Maybe it's doing that by default? As I said, just a hunch, haha :D
Thanks but pretty sure it is disabled. I will have another look tonight but I distinctly remember I turned off the onboard video when installing the 8500gt. Still, I've been wrong before :-)
I found XP to be a real pain to get working with the 780g chipset mostly because of hardware acceleration problems in both game and videos. Yet again this was about 6 months ago so things might have changed.
OH I forgot to mention that to unlock the advanced video decoding of the chipset you need to use a phenom processor.
I use the 780g and phenom proccesor with both vista and win7 and in media portal i have no problems with decoding any freeview channels using the pdvd8 codecs. I also have vista codec pack with h264 decoding disabled, which forces the pdvd8 codec to be used. To get it to use dxva you need to edit the graph while a video is playing and check the video acceleration checkbox in pdvd8 codec properties.
As for WMC in win7 I can get channels 1-3 with 3 occasionaly screwing up. all other 576p channels have green blocks indicating that dxva isnt working right but its trying to decode it in hardware anyway, which is stupid as it should fall back to software decoding on dxva faiilure.
There is a workaround to getting another codec to do the h264 decoding but it doesnt work for tv. If only MS allowed us to chose our own codecs or make their own work in the first place, but as far as I talked with people from MS they aknowledged the problem being with their own codec not proccesing the data stream properly due to slight variations in our dvb-t encoding but I never heard back from them about any fixes.
PS. This is totally out of context but has anyone managed to get an hvr2200 or hvr4000 to do a channel scan in media portal in win7 x64?
Yep I use an HVR 22000 and I'm pretty sure it scanned all the channels just fine in W7 64x. However, I had the exact same issues you're describing - unwatchable green blocks on channels 4+ and channel 3 was very iffy - stuttering was quite regular, although I could usually get round the latter by timeshifting back a few seconds. On top of that I had some issues with the EPG. Most people seem to be able to get now and next EPG data through DVB-T in W7, but it almost always gave me nothing. One time I booted up the computer and noticed that somehow it had now and next guide data, but the rest of the time... nothing.
Are you subscribed to our RSS feed? You can download the latest headlines and summaries from our stories directly
to your computer or smartphone by using a feed reader.
