ATi Graphics & H.264 freeview streams. Fixed?

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › ATi Graphics & H.264 freeview streams. Fixed?

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#272754 13-Nov-2009 14:46

browned:
I am an dedicated nVidia graphics card user, but the new AMD 5xxx series graphics cards allow bitstreaming over HDMI. AFAIK they are the first discrete graphics card that allow that. nVidia can't do it yet.

sorry what does bitstreaming do ?

cheers

kiwijunglist

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#272756 13-Nov-2009 14:53

those chunky green blocks were related to old drivers.

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richms

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#272774 13-Nov-2009 15:23

itey:
browned:
I am an dedicated nVidia graphics card user, but the new AMD 5xxx series graphics cards allow bitstreaming over HDMI. AFAIK they are the first discrete graphics card that allow that. nVidia can't do it yet.

sorry what does bitstreaming do ?

cheers

Lets you send the compressed audio over HDMI to get decoded in your reciever.

I am yet to be convinced that it is of any use in reality since you can just send uncompressed over it which means that the PC can mix other sounds in which is not an option with bitstreaming.

Basically the new version of a 5.1 on optical out that you got with some but not all soundcards when playing a dvd.

Richard rich.ms

gbwelly

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#273050 14-Nov-2009 17:45

The green problem is gone, but the mutant intermittant corruption problem on TV3 is still present in the 9.10 drivers.

psk20

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#276275 25-Nov-2009 18:32

gbwelly: The green problem is gone, but the mutant intermittant corruption problem on TV3 is still present in the 9.10 drivers.

OMG yessss. this is *exactly* the problem I have. I used to have green blocks, but now it just spazzes out every so often (but otherwise runs great).

Is it understood specifically what the problem is caused by? I assumed it was my ati hd4870 but wasn't 100% sure. Because I use the card for games I can't just go out and replace it with a 9600GT. Have ati acknowledged the issue and is there any indication that they intend to fix it?

Out of interest, is there a technical term for the anomaly, or is "mutant intermittant corruption" the closest thing we have? It would be nice to have more well defined terms to put into my google search as I pine about this :P

sbiddle

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#276278 25-Nov-2009 19:06

I notice the new Catalyst drivers out last week also mention H.264 fixes when using Cyberlink PowerDVD.

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gbwelly

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#276280 25-Nov-2009 19:10

Hi psk20

no official name for it, but a search on thegreenbutton.com for 'bbc hd' should turn up plenty for you.
There is a bit of anger in the ATi forums: http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=117619&highlight_key=y&keyword1=bbc
I moved the ATI card onto the gaming rig and went for a 9500GT on the media center. I started my quest for proper ATI drivers at 9.5, gave up at 9.9. Haven't tried the 9.11 drivers but not holding out any hope personally.

dklong

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#276285 25-Nov-2009 19:40

Seems if you have an older ATI then you can use the older Catalyst drivers and you can make Freeview work OK. A mate at work bought a motherboard with a later ATI graphics card... supposedly better, but it couldn't use the earlier drivers so he just couldn't get TV3 to work reliably. He eventually gave up and bought an Nvidia and it just worked first time.

I'm sure the issue is drivers not hardware... but it gets old quickly if you can't watch TV3 without random hanging.

Cheers

kiwijunglist

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#276290 25-Nov-2009 20:00

I've setup 3x HTPC with ATI cards, no problems with 1080i HDTV TV3. This is with XP (MP) and Win7 (MCE). I havn't seen any problems since CCC 8.12

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psk20

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Master Geek

#276348 25-Nov-2009 22:50

Ah thanks for that info. I haven't been watching the forums recently but if you search my username and "ati" you'll see that a few months back I made a few posts on here and also on the ati website too (although that was mostly about the green-blocking - which was even worse than the current prob).

How bad is the problem for most people? Some said it was making it unwatchable. I'd say that for me it's definitely watchable, but it's bloody annoying, especially considering that playback is otherwise really good!

I've been trying different codecs and I think ffdshow may be slightly better than microsoft's codec, but neither is particularly good.

Unfortunately because I'm using a 4870 and windows 7 I don't think 9.7 is an option either :(

kiwijunglist

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#276357 25-Nov-2009 23:14

Are you using win7 mce?

I found the microsoft h264 codec was rubbish for freeview hdtv, ffdshow won't support hardware acceleration. I'd recommend you install hdpack 2.2 and use either pdvd8 or pdvd9 h264 codec. You will need to install a program to stop mce using the MS codec and force it to use pdvd codec instead.

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psk20

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#276366 25-Nov-2009 23:34

I'm using 7MC (64bit). I did have the issue in the 32 bit version too though.

I've tried the microsoft codec, ffdshow,and MPC HC - all though Shark007's codec pack. I have a bundled version of powerdvd for blu ray playback (I think technically it is 7.3 BD edition).

I thought Cyberlink recently prevented external apps from using their codecs? I guess there might be a workaround for that though...

So, ffdshow doesn't support hardware acceleration - that probably explains why the problem is far more subtle. In fact, I just checked ffdshow again, and although there is the occasional blocky artifact, it may not be the exact same problem I get with the MS codec. With the MS codec, the image becomes seriously blocky and 'blended' with information from several seconds earlier. With ffdshow I haven't noticed that specific phenomenon - there's glitchyness, but it's more subtle and less common and may not ever do the crazy time-travel thing...

Considering that I have a fairly solid quad core CPU (Phenom x4 9750), ffdshow still only uses 10-30% of my CPU power according to task manager (occasionally I see it spike to 50%). Still, hardware acceleration would be preferrable as sometimes I leave dragon age origins running in the background while watching tv. I think I might run into issues if I try and do that with ffdshow! UPDATE: I tried it, and I actually managed to watch CSI on tv3 with CPU usage in the 60-70% range while dragon age was running in the background. However, after alt-tabbing into dragon age and back out again, 7MC has stopped responding. D'oh!

It looks like MS and ATI may have just started trying to fix the issue...

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2008334

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#276367 26-Nov-2009 00:01

Yea the MS codec is sposed to do DXVA, but it craps out when the overlays are on the screen and it can't handle corruptions in the dvb-t stream. you are correct about latest versions od pdvd not supporting 3rd party apps, the work around is just to use an older build.

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Nety

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#276380 26-Nov-2009 06:42

kiwijunglist: Yea the MS codec is sposed to do DXVA, but it craps out when the overlays are on the screen and it can't handle corruptions in the dvb-t stream. you are correct about latest versions od pdvd not supporting 3rd party apps, the work around is just to use an older build.

The MS codec works find on my NVidia hardware and I have not heard of anyone else with Nvidia hardware having issues so I would say it is the ATI hardware/drivers that are the issue rather then MS's codec.

I do wish ATI would get this sorted out though. It seems that ATI have some much nicer passive video card options then the NVidia cards have. Not sure why, maybe the ATI's run cooler or something?

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dale77

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#277585 29-Nov-2009 21:15

I saw regular (like clockwork) corruption of the DVB-T stream ONCE a few months ago on TV1 with ATI HD3200. It was definitely related to a particular DVB-T corruption event in the stream. Possibly, those having issues with ATI and TV3 are getting regular instances of this particular corruption. In my case, if I stopped and restarted playback after the corruption event, the problem went away.

I have never seen "mutant intermittent corruption" on TV3 with ATI HD3200, or now ATI 4670.

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