TV3 glitches in MediaPortal RC4

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mmtz

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Topic # 30713 18-Feb-2009 17:15

   Hi everybody- first I have to thank everyone for all the high-quality advice I've lurked from here in the past year, it was an enormous help in making decisions for building my own HTPC.

    I run an Athlon 64X2, A8N SLI mobo, 7800GT and HVR2200 rendering everything through powerdvd8 that have been working flawlessly for the past six-odd months, running MediaPortal RC2- until a couple of days ago- and Vista 32 Ultimate. Just after christmas I started getting occasional episodes of jumping back and forth between the first frame rendered, the current frame and a green screen on TV3, though sound works as normal, and these episodes have been getting steadily more common.
    This seems to be a problem I'm having with how MediaPortal is playing TV3 video as I am able to record and run the transport stream files in MCP without the same error. I've tried all of the h264 codecs installed- ffdshow, powerdvd8 and the windows driver in MediaPortal, and all have given the same result.
    Frustrated, I did a fresh install of windows, mediaportal rc4, powerdvd8 and the CCCP pack in an attempt to get TV3 working again, but to no avail! All the other channels work well, video playback is excellent, and overall everything except this is top-notch, it feels like there's one little thing I must be missing and I'm tearing my hair out!

Any suggestions of other things I could try that I may have missed would be much appreciated.

duckquack

75 posts

Master Geek
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Reply # 196561 18-Feb-2009 17:22

Have you tried the newest version of MediaPortal, you mention you are using RC4, MediaPortal has since released MP 1.0.

This might be worth a try.

mmtz

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 196564 18-Feb-2009 17:29

Thanks for that, will give it a try tonight- I'd pulled the RC4 installer late last year and apparantly hadn't realised that the 1.0 release was the newer version.

sbiddle

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Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

Reply # 196566 18-Feb-2009 17:31

Since your video card doesn't do H.264 hardware accelertion your CPU is doing all the work decoding the picture. If you have anything below an X2 5000 then your CPU will be being maxed out which will be the root cause of the problem since TV3's 1080i decoding requires significant resources. The 720p and 576i broadcasts by other channels aren't so heavy on resources.

Even if you do have a faster CPU hardware based H.264 decoding is highly recommended as it removes all the load from the CPU and results in superior picture quality and deinterlacing.

mmtz

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 196588 18-Feb-2009 19:47

sbiddle:
Since your video card doesn't do H.264 hardware accelertion your CPU is doing all the work decoding the picture. If you have anything below an X2 5000 then your CPU will be being maxed out which will be the root cause of the problem since TV3's 1080i decoding requires significant resources. The 720p and 576i broadcasts by other channels aren't so heavy on resources.

Even if you do have a faster CPU hardware based H.264 decoding is highly recommended as it removes all the load from the CPU and results in superior picture quality and deinterlacing.

I see- I'd had the 7800GT sitting in a box for a couple of years and recalled that it did hardware acceleration, just pulled out the manual and it only supports MPEG2 and WMV9. I'd assumed the hardware acceleration was working since the CPU rarely breaks 50-60% usage, but in retrospect that is probably one core maxing out.

One of the pitfalls of reusing your old hardware based on vague memories. I'll look at replacing the 7800GT, probably with something close to a modern equivalent, having plenty of power in the HTPC is nice for when company wants to play games on the big tv.

Thanks very much for clearing that up.