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#114931 5-Mar-2008 21:38

1. As noted most US shows are shot in HD. Question is, how are they distributed? Not much point distributing them in HD if the receiving network doesn't have the capability to show them. So I would imagine during mastering they produce HD and non-HD versions. For the non HD versions I suspect they would also deliver PAL versions rather than rely on the receiving network to do the conversion>

2. As for Shortland Street, well some would say who cares? HD capture and production is quite expensive and TVNZ would have to decide if the cost justified the return.

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#114935 5-Mar-2008 21:40

I've spent hours today trouble shooting my system and just have one thing to say.

Don't buy an ATI video card for your HTPC. You are wasting your money.

The current ATI Catalyst drivers (incl the 8.3 release coming out today) are incapable of accelerating H.264 interlaced content using the EVR renderer under Vista. Playing back interlaced video suffers from a lot of garbled and pixelated video and numerous problems. Progressive scan content is OK. The problems affect both GB-PVR and DVBViewer and I'm assuming Media Portal as well if that's capable of using the EVR renderer. Your only option to get decent video is to use the VMR9 renderer which is a huge step backwards.

I'm planning on ditching my ATI2600 and moving to NVidia.

JaBZ

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#114958 5-Mar-2008 23:55

I'm now more seriously thinking about building a HTPC out of the Shuttle SG33G5M instead of getting the Tvix 6500 I keep changing my mind every few days.
Know if the Intel GMA 3100 onboard video is capable of 1080P output, preferabally with Hardware decoding?.

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itey

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#114965 6-Mar-2008 06:55

sbiddle:

I'm planning on ditching my ATI2600 and moving to NVidia.

sub seemed to have got it to work, did he not?

sub

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#114970 6-Mar-2008 08:28

itey:
sbiddle:

I'm planning on ditching my ATI2600 and moving to NVidia.

sub seemed to have got it to work, did he not?

I get a low 5% or so CPU usage, and pretty good picture, but about 1 out 10 channel switches from TV1/TV2 (720p) to TV3 (1080i) seems to result in some garbage and flickering in the frame. Its hard to tell if this is because of the decoder not always correctly handling the format change, or if it is something to do with the ATI drivers.

Because its only happening with EVR and hardware acceleration in use, I'm guessing its ATI at fault, not the decoder.

mcraenz

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#114976 6-Mar-2008 08:54

sbiddle: Your only option to get decent video is to use the VMR9 renderer which is a huge step backwards.
I'm planning on ditching my ATI2600 and moving to NVidia.

Won't you just live with VMR9 until ATI fixes the problem? Or is that not likley to happen any soon? Also do you have it on good authority that NVIDIA will solve all your problems?

@Fossie:
Re: guide AAC in for MP.
Just install the latest SVN snapshot and maybe re-scan in the channels? Of course you'll need the appropriate h.264 decoder and hardware but the AAC decoder is bundled with MediaPortal thanks to Igor Jánoš : http://blog.monogram.sk/janos/2008/03/04/monogram-aac-decoder-0920-beta/

I suspect GBPRV users will also thank Igor?

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#114977 6-Mar-2008 09:01

mcraenz:
sbiddle: Your only option to get decent video is to use the VMR9 renderer which is a huge step backwards.
I'm planning on ditching my ATI2600 and moving to NVidia.

Won't you just live with VMR9 until ATI fixes the problem? Or is that not likley to happen any soon? Also do you have it on good authority that NVIDIA will solve all your problems?

NVidia's current drivers and hardware appear to accelerate H.264 interlaced content OK using EVR. With the power required for H.264 decoding, especially 1080i content which does cripple a mid range machine having hardware acceleration working well is essential. I'm planning on getting an 8500 or 8600 to have a play.

IMHO VMR9 is just not a patch on EVR both in terms of picture quality & colour and it's total lack of tearing.

@Fossie:
Re: guide AAC in for MP.
Just install the latest SVN snapshot and maybe re-scan in the channels? Of course you'll need the appropriate h.264 decoder and hardware but the AAC decoder is bundled with MediaPortal thanks to Igor Jánoš : http://blog.monogram.sk/janos/2008/03/04/monogram-aac-decoder-0920-beta/

I suspect GBPRV users will also thank Igor?

Yes - his Monogram AAC decoder is a great program! Just be aware there are still issues with the last 2 releases. v9.0.0 seems to be the most stable at present, 9.1.0 and 9.2.0 seem to have issus with audio randomly dropping out. Hopefully this will be fixed shortly.

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mcraenz

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#114980 6-Mar-2008 09:23

I was pretty keen on a 85/8600 until I raed this which commented on the picture quality of them vs the ATI:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071230-measuring-cpu-usage-during-hd-playback-ati-vs-nvidia.html
It is just 1 review though I guess.

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#114990 6-Mar-2008 10:10

That review shows the ATI cards not performing as well as the NVidia's with 1080i content. ATI does handle VC1 a lot better than NVidia but that's a moot point since VC1 is dead.

I would hope that ATI can do something about their problems, I'm about to try and contact them to see if they have any comments about their problems. I'd refuse to believe they aren't aware of them but the big qustion is how long it could take them to fix them.

mcraenz

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#114995 6-Mar-2008 11:38

I was mainly referring to the image quality comments about the 85/8600 not he CPU performance. I'd be happy to sacrifice some more CPU if the image quality is better. It's indicated in the review that only the 8800 can compete with even the 2400xt in terms of image quality.

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lchiu7

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#115247 7-Mar-2008 16:29

sub:
itey:
sbiddle:

I'm planning on ditching my ATI2600 and moving to NVidia.

sub seemed to have got it to work, did he not?
I get a low 5% or so CPU usage, and pretty good picture, but about 1 out 10 channel switches from TV1/TV2 (720p) to TV3 (1080i) seems to result in some garbage and flickering in the frame. Its hard to tell if this is because of the decoder not always correctly handling the format change, or if it is something to do with the ATI drivers.

Because its only happening with EVR and hardware acceleration in use, I'm guessing its ATI at fault, not the decoder.

One point that hasn't been made clear by any poster is about CPU usage and dual core machines.

Assuming (rightly or wrongly) that most of the PVR apps out there don't really take advantage of both cores, is this cpu usage of 5% -90% on one core only or is it on both cores? I am asking only because if you have say a AMD X2 4000 running at 10% using say a hardware accelerated card, is it going to be any worse than say a single core X64 AMD CPU at 4000?

One of my machines has a dual core AMD at 3000 and the only application I have seen that drives both cores is x264.exe - a free ware h.264 encoder. I have seen 100% cpu utilisation on both cores. I am sure that Adobe Photoshop or Premiere might exercise both cores but very few freeware or shareware ones would.

Any thoughts on this?

Larry

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scottjpalmer

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#115262 7-Mar-2008 17:09

On both my XP and Vista machines (both C2D) the CPU usage graph in Task Manager is basically the same for both cores when using DVBViewer.

cranz

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#115271 7-Mar-2008 18:02

scottjpalmer: On both my XP and Vista machines (both C2D) the CPU usage graph in Task Manager is basically the same for both cores when using DVBViewer.

same here, 2% for TVNZ on both cores 5% for TV3 on both cores using DVBviewer and Mediaportal (TVServer)

lchiu7

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#115277 7-Mar-2008 18:43

That sounds promising. It means I am guessing with a decent video card with h.264 acceleration, then a single core X64 3000 or so should be able to playback the streams without choking?

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sub

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#115280 7-Mar-2008 18:47

GB-PVRs pretty much the same, with a fairly even distributions across cores. Most directshow apps are pretty good at sharing the load between CPU cores.

On my AMD X2 4400+ machine, it used about 90% CPU on both cores to play the 1080i streams.

On my Intel E6400 machine, with software decoding, it uses about 40-60% CPU on both cores for the 1080i streams (exact usage varied between CoreAVC and Cyberlink decoders). It used somewhere less than about %5 CPU when hardware acceleration was in use.

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