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dfn_doe
Apr 12, 2005
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

pooper scooper posted:

My proposed setup, will get me NTSC and ClearQAM in digital standard definition and high definition, correct? I should be able to see my local news channel in standard (or HD if available), as well as Dirty Jobs in standard (and HD if available).

Right now you get ntsc unencrypted channels, your new setup will get ntsc unencrypted channels as well as whichever channels your cableco provides unencrypted via QAM digital. They are only required by law to carry the same local broadcast stuff unencrypted as you would be able to get via ATSC digital OTA. However, many cable companies (for whatever internal reasons, lack of compute power is my guess) broadcast a large swath of their basic package in digital unencrypted. However you may find that the unencrypted digital channels may not be HD, but rather a SD simulcast of the cableco's analog offerings. For instance I receive espn via clearQAM digital but it is only in SD, my cableco does offer espn in high definition, but that channel is only available as encrypted QAM which as you stated would require a cablecard based tuner to receive.

Everyone's goals vary so what your proposed setup mayor may not give you everything you are looking for, hence the recommendation to hook up you HD set's tuner directly to the cable first and see what channels you actually get and then use that information to make an informed decision about what you want and to what lengths you are willing to go to get there.

tl;dr version, you'll get al the same SD analog stuff you get now as well as some digital channels, minimally the same digital you'd get with an antenna.

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pooper scooper
Oct 23, 2003
Shovel. Rake. Bag.
Thanks, you're most helpful.

The last two or three pages of this thread have been really informative and relevant to newbies like myself.

dyne
May 9, 2003
[blank]

weaaddar posted:

So I bought an HD4350 from New egg for 27$ after rebate which has DXDA. However, after running DXDA checker it doesn't seem that MPC-HC is using it.
When trying to play 1080p videos, my CPU is churning at 80-90% percent. I uninstalled CCCP and FFDSHow assuming that without them, my PC would pick the right filter, but no.
I'm using Vista SP1
Am I an idiot?.
Also, who's the genius that decided that as soon as you install an HDMI video card that you want your on-board audio to turn off, as who the hell would want to send audio through optical, when they can send it through the non-connected HDMI port. [thanks HP!].

I set up DXVA on my new HTPC set up (with a 780G board) this past weekend and ran into this problem too. My problem was that I was trying to play an h.264 video that was encoded in a non supported profile (I think that's how you'd describe it). Some of my videos work with DXVA and others don't.

weaaddar
Jul 17, 2004
HAY GUYS WHAT IS TEH INTERWEBNET, AND ISN'T A0L the SECKZ!? :LOL: 1337
PS I'M A FUCKING LOSER
Yeah I just found out that you're right.
I was using an L5 1080p video that was super duper high quality. But my lower quality 1080ps & 720p videos work. Unfortunately, I was still unhappy that with CoreAVC when running said video I was rocking like 80%-90% and making my CPU churn loud if I was doing anything beside watching said video. I bought the card thinking that it would help me it.

Apparently, I should've bought an NVIDIA card.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?
Neither cccp or ffdshow support dxva. If you want a free solution, then get the media player classic stand alone filters. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=170561. Be warned that you may still need to go into the codec properties to enable it. use your player's properties or graphedit to do it.

Kreez
Oct 18, 2003

Just got my USB-UIRT set up with Eventghost and I love it. I installed the trial of Girder and couldn't understand what the gently caress was going on and uninstalled it. Eventghost is so intuitive, simpler, and free. Right now I just have it waking/sleeping and play/pause/stop/ff/rr in MPC and WMP. Once I settle on a front end, I'll get it working there too.

Getting the UIRT to wake the computer was simple. There are about 8000 questions online asking how to do it, with no good answers. Maybe someone will come upon this post, so here it is:
There's a tiny application from the UIRT guy (lrnhelper.exe) that can flash the internal memory of the UIRT. You can store up to 4 IR codes in there. If the UIRT recieves any of those codes, the UIRT sends the universal "Wake up!" code over USB.

It's a bit odd having both a smart remote and smart IR reciever/software, you have to make sure neither of them are trying to be too intelligent, otherwise wierd poo poo happens.

Now the last thing for me to do to finish my HTPC is to get a frontend that will use DXVA going. Using the external player features on XBMC or Mediaportal is looking promising but a complete pain in the rear end.

ilifinicus
Mar 7, 2004

I decided to take the new GeForce 9300 for a spin, and have now set up a nifty HTPC setup. My beef however is that Vista somehow thinks my TV doesn't support HDMI Audio - yet I'm using my XBox 360 with HDMI and audio just fine.

Setup:
Antec Fusion Silver HTPC cabinet
XFX GeForce 9300
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
Corsair TWINX 2xGB DDR2-800
LG Blu-ray GGL-H20L
2x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
Running Vista Ultimate 64-bit
TV is a Samsung LE40M67BD.

Any ideas why my HDMI Audio output is shown as "disconnected"?

vanilla slimfast
Dec 6, 2006

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome



ilifin posted:

I decided to take the new GeForce 9300 for a spin, and have now set up a nifty HTPC setup. My beef however is that Vista somehow thinks my TV doesn't support HDMI Audio - yet I'm using my XBox 360 with HDMI and audio just fine.

Setup:
Antec Fusion Silver HTPC cabinet
XFX GeForce 9300
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
Corsair TWINX 2xGB DDR2-800
LG Blu-ray GGL-H20L
2x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
Running Vista Ultimate 64-bit
TV is a Samsung LE40M67BD.

Any ideas why my HDMI Audio output is shown as "disconnected"?

Is there a cable you need to connect from the motherboard S/PDIF header to the video card to supply the audio? Or does the video card have it's own audio hardware/driver built in?

ilifinicus
Mar 7, 2004

vanilla slimfast posted:

Is there a cable you need to connect from the motherboard S/PDIF header to the video card to supply the audio? Or does the video card have it's own audio hardware/driver built in?
I know there's a SPDIF header, 3-pin one, on the motherboard. But - thing is that the videocard is built-in on the motherboard. It's an IGP, so I haven't really found any SPDIF connector for the IGP. Unless I have no idea what I am doing and I need some special HDMI cable that takes that SPDIF input or something? I am really on shaky ground here, not too sure how it works.

cultureulterior
Jan 27, 2004
Having asked about this earlier in the thread, I must say that VDPAU works fantastically well with the latest linux nvidia drivers. I bought a MSI9400GT and 1080p x264 content is slick like never before.

vanilla slimfast
Dec 6, 2006

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome



ilifin posted:

I know there's a SPDIF header, 3-pin one, on the motherboard. But - thing is that the videocard is built-in on the motherboard. It's an IGP, so I haven't really found any SPDIF connector for the IGP. Unless I have no idea what I am doing and I need some special HDMI cable that takes that SPDIF input or something? I am really on shaky ground here, not too sure how it works.

Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about a separate video card, not one integrated into the motherboard.

Perhaps there is a jumper or BIOS setting you have to enable to switch on HDMI audio output? Having it integrated means you shouldn't have to wire anything additional up.

cultureulterior posted:

Having asked about this earlier in the thread, I must say that VDPAU works fantastically well with the latest linux nvidia drivers. I bought a MSI9400GT and 1080p x264 content is slick like never before.

Awesome, glad to hear it. I've seen positive reports so far on the MythTV users list about it as well. My next upgrades to the HTPC will be centered around using VDPAU so I can hopefully reduce the heat/noise footprint of my current solution (which is a beast) and possibly use the previous parts to build another frontend or backend.

ilifinicus
Mar 7, 2004

vanilla slimfast posted:

Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about a separate video card, not one integrated into the motherboard.

Perhaps there is a jumper or BIOS setting you have to enable to switch on HDMI audio output? Having it integrated means you shouldn't have to wire anything additional up.
I tried searching for any jumpers for this, as I already turned on the support in the BIOS. The only jumper available is the one for overclocking the card. Further googling has led me to believe this is a widespread problem sometimes - it seems to be inconsistent whether people have problems with it or not. At least analog audio is working - I've filed some hopefully helpful tickets for this now.

dfn_doe
Apr 12, 2005
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS
Just dropping in ahead of todays big game to see if any of you guys did any last minute shake downs to make sure your system doesn't melt down in front of family and friends in the middle of the Super Bowl.

Personally I went through and defragged my data disk, disabled the digital tuner on my hvr1600 (it's been acting a little funny lately and the HDhomerun works great for HD) and rerouted that cable to my TV's inbuilt tuner in case of a full system melt down I can bypass the DVR and go straight to live TV via direct connect.

Grabbed 2 sheets of 3-d glasses from Target this morning too, I'm looking forward to seeing the two 3d promos during the game as well as tomorrow's episode of chuck. I've never had an opportunity to see hidef 3d content; luckily I grabbed the absolute last glasses they had at target, so all my SB party company can enjoy the tech.

P.S. Thanks again to whom ever it was a few pages ago that mentioned that media player classic home cinema supports hardware acceleration. I downloaded the standalone directshow filters from sourceforge and they work great! Between mkvtoolnix, eac3to, anydvd-hd, evodemux, and mpc-hc I've cooked up a pretty smooth workflow to rip all my bluray and hd-dvd movies to my htpc which means no more futzing with cyberlink's recent missteps and breakages with powerdvd.

P.P.S. If anyone is considering buying 1TB hard disks for their HTPC I'd shy away from the maxtor units. I picked up 2 of them on super deep sale from frys a couple weeks ago and they work fine but are CRAZY LOUD when doing random seeks. Even with silicon isolation bumpers on all attachment points they make a hell of a racket when I am recording multiple streams. OTOH the pair of seagate 7200.11 500GB drives I tossed in my desktop are dead silent. YMMV

The Human Cow
May 24, 2004

hurry up
Are Blu-Ray drives worth installing in an HTPC? I remember reading a month or so ago that there is no good way to get the full audio out of the disc in an HTPC. Is this true? I'm thinking about buying one to pop into my HTPC, but if the audio is gimped I'll wait and see what happens in the future.

dfn_doe
Apr 12, 2005
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

The Human Cow posted:

Are Blu-Ray drives worth installing in an HTPC? I remember reading a month or so ago that there is no good way to get the full audio out of the disc in an HTPC. Is this true? I'm thinking about buying one to pop into my HTPC, but if the audio is gimped I'll wait and see what happens in the future.

Methods for getting TrueHD output from an htpc are limited, but that will change. Seems that right now your best bet is the asus xonar. If you don't have 8 channel surround setup in your home theater it seems (to me at least) that being limited to dolby digital isn't much of a problem. When you get up into the higher end of the surround sound schemes it generally turns out that listening space and configuration/quality of speakers make a bigger difference than sheer bit density of the stream or number of channels.

tl;dr in my opinion most living rooms sound pretty much the same with 6 channels as they do with 8. YMMV, if you have a huge home theater space and/or really high end speakers you are not in the majority.

shaitan
Mar 8, 2004
g.d.m.f.s.o.b.

dfn_doe posted:

Methods for getting TrueHD output from an htpc are limited, but that will change. Seems that right now your best bet is the asus xonar. If you don't have 8 channel surround setup in your home theater it seems (to me at least) that being limited to dolby digital isn't much of a problem. When you get up into the higher end of the surround sound schemes it generally turns out that listening space and configuration/quality of speakers make a bigger difference than sheer bit density of the stream or number of channels.

tl;dr in my opinion most living rooms sound pretty much the same with 6 channels as they do with 8. YMMV, if you have a huge home theater space and/or really high end speakers you are not in the majority.

What if your reciever only supports multichannel analog? I know some stand alone players you can pass the uncompressed audio into older recievers that have analog inputs, is there a motherboard or soundcard along with software that can do this?

dfn_doe
Apr 12, 2005
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

shaitan posted:

What if your reciever only supports multichannel analog? I know some stand alone players you can pass the uncompressed audio into older recievers that have analog inputs, is there a motherboard or soundcard along with software that can do this?

I've never tried to do it this way, but many audio cards these days have analog 3.5mm outputs for 6 channel sound. I just did a quick check against some anydvd-hd decrypted bluray m2ts files and I am able to pull AC3 or DTS out with software directshow decoder and I'm able to pipe that out via spdif. The properties page of the mpc-hc ac3 filter would lead me to believe you can choose your own channel mapping for multichannel analog output; but as I said I haven't tried that before.

Cheesus Christ
Nov 12, 2008
I hope you guys can help me. I have an XP computer hooked up to my TV via VGA and a 7Meg internet service. I can watch 720p files all day long in VLC player, but when I try to watch 420p shows on Hulu the playback goes to hell. This only happens in full screen. When I leave it small its okay, and when I use the pop-out and maximize it its okay. I'm using Firefox, btw.

Stuntman Mike
Apr 14, 2007
The saucer people are coming!
So I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this (ie: no), but I'll ask anyway because I'm pretty uneducated as far as BluRay goes. I cannot use Media Center to play back bluray disks - I've got to buy PowerDVD or whatever, right?

There's no way to play bluray disks with my Windows media Center frontend? I have to exit to the desktop and then open powerdvd/etc to play it?

VVVV coo

Stuntman Mike fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Feb 3, 2009

SuperCaptainJ
Jun 24, 2005

Stuntman Mike posted:

So I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this (ie: no), but I'll ask anyway because I'm pretty uneducated as far as BluRay goes. I cannot use Media Center to play back bluray disks - I've got to buy PowerDVD or whatever, right?

There's no way to play bluray disks with my Windows media Center frontend? I have to exit to the desktop and then open powerdvd/etc to play it?

There are Windows Media Center plugins that allow you to have a Blu-Ray option that opens PowerDVD, enters fullscreen automatically, and allows remote control. It's more clunky than regular DVDs but it works fine.

Ashex
Jun 25, 2007

These pipes are cleeeean!!!
My Intel DG45FC died unexpectedly last week. I'm going to have to do an RMA a second time. I really haven't been enjoying this board, it's my first Intel build and I've had to deal with video issues, hardware issues, and an overall feeling of shoddy work.

I'm considering just replacing the whole thing with something else. Can anyone suggest an alternative to this board for a Mini-ITX htpc? My only requirement is HDMI. eSata is a plus but not a requirement.
Also, would like to avoid Intel.

Visual GNUdio
Aug 27, 2003


I've recently jumped into the HTPC world with the Asus P5N7A-VM motherboard and I have to say it's been pretty great so far! The system is running Vista Ultimate x64 with VMC.

I am however having one weird audio problem. I am running HDMI to my projector (Mitsubishi HC5500) and optical audio to my receiver (Panasonic SA-XR57). The receiver supports DD/DTS but not WMA Pro. I am running optical to the receiver separately from the HDMI feed as the receiver also will not pass 1080p. I have configured the digital output in Vista's speaker properties for DD and DTS but left WMA unchecked.

The problem is that whenever I play a WMV video file with multi-track WMA audio streams I only get stereo audio passed to my receiver. Here's an example file:
code:
Audio
Format                           : WMA3
Format profile                   : M2
Codec ID                         : 162
Codec ID/Info                    : Windows Media Audio 3
Description of the codec         : Windows Media Audio 10 Professional - 640 kbps, 48 kHz, 5.1 channel 24 bit 1-pass CBR
Duration                         : 1h 44mn
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 640 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 6 channels
Sampling rate                    : 48.0 KHz
Resolution                       : 24 bits
Language                         : en-us
All other formats work fine and pass multi-channel audio information via S/PDIF as expected. I've installed the latest Vista Codec Pack. This problem persists if I use MPC-HC, Zoom, VMC, or WMP11.

Any thoughts as to what might be happening?

dfn_doe
Apr 12, 2005
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW STUPID FUCKING CATCHPHRASE OVERLORDS

luma posted:

I've recently jumped into the HTPC world with the Asus P5N7A-VM motherboard and I have to say it's been pretty great so far! The system is running Vista Ultimate x64 with VMC.

I am however having one weird audio problem. I am running HDMI to my projector (Mitsubishi HC5500) and optical audio to my receiver (Panasonic SA-XR57). The receiver supports DD/DTS but not WMA Pro. I am running optical to the receiver separately from the HDMI feed as the receiver also will not pass 1080p. I have configured the digital output in Vista's speaker properties for DD and DTS but left WMA unchecked.

The problem is that whenever I play a WMV video file with multi-track WMA audio streams I only get stereo audio passed to my receiver. Here's an example file:
code:
Audio
Format                           : WMA3
Format profile                   : M2
Codec ID                         : 162
Codec ID/Info                    : Windows Media Audio 3
Description of the codec         : Windows Media Audio 10 Professional - 640 kbps, 48 kHz, 5.1 channel 24 bit 1-pass CBR
Duration                         : 1h 44mn
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 640 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 6 channels
Sampling rate                    : 48.0 KHz
Resolution                       : 24 bits
Language                         : en-us
All other formats work fine and pass multi-channel audio information via S/PDIF as expected. I've installed the latest Vista Codec Pack. This problem persists if I use MPC-HC, Zoom, VMC, or WMP11.

Any thoughts as to what might be happening?

Best thing to do is open the file in graphedit and see what your filter graph looks like. Could be that you need to promote or demote some of your audio filters and/or change some of the filter properties.

Which reminds me, I found a sweet replacement for graphedit the other day, graphstudio. If you fire it up as administrator you should be able to modify your filter priorities easily enough if need be.

Visual GNUdio
Aug 27, 2003


dfn_doe posted:

Best thing to do is open the file in graphedit and see what your filter graph looks like. Could be that you need to promote or demote some of your audio filters and/or change some of the filter properties.

Which reminds me, I found a sweet replacement for graphedit the other day, graphstudio. If you fire it up as administrator you should be able to modify your filter priorities easily enough if need be.

I'm working with GraphStudio to take a look at the problem. Here's a WMV video:


Here's the input and output dialogs for the WMAudio Decoder DMO. Note the nChannels on In vs. Out:


Now I trancoded the same video to MKV using a WMV to MKV converter which stream copies the video while transcoding WMA streams to AC3 5.1. Here's what it looks like in GraphStudio:


Here's the input and output. Note this time I'm getting 6 channels out.


For some reason, it appears that the WMAudio Decoder DMO is knocking my 6 channel audio to 2 channel.

evilalien
Jul 29, 2005

Knowledge is born from Curiosity.

luma posted:

For some reason, it appears that the WMAudio Decoder DMO is knocking my 6 channel audio to 2 channel.

S/PDIF won't do any more than stereo PCM due to bandwidth limitations. Is there any setting in the audio decoder to output the sound as compressed Dolby or DTS instead of PCM?

Stabby McDamage
Dec 11, 2005

Doctor Rope
My HTPC can't seem to push Hulu/Netflix streaming stuff to my new HDTV at 1080p.

My setup can play DVDs fine at about 25% CPU, but online streaming in fullscreen is choppy, with very high CPU utilization. For example, this Conan O'Brien episode on Hulu runs smoothly at ~50% CPU at default size, but becomes choppy and pegs the CPU in fullscreen. Watching a NetFlix stream is even worse, and it isn't a buffering problem.

My question: Do I need more CPU power to play these things (despite easily playing a DVD), or do I have some other issue?

Hulu performance was fine on my SDTV with my old video card, a GeForce4 MX440, but my screen resolution was 1024x768 at the time. Does video scaling really require the CPU that much? I figured that's something the video card would take care of.

I'm running Windows XP SP3 32-bit on an Athlon XP 3000+ (2.2GHz), 512MB PC2700 RAM*, nForce2 chipset, nVideo GeForce FX 5500 128MB (AGP), WDC 20GB HDD, Wired LAN to cable modem.

I made a HoTS thread about this here, but on reflection, I think the question should go here.

vanilla slimfast
Dec 6, 2006

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome



evilalien posted:

S/PDIF won't do any more than stereo PCM due to bandwidth limitations. Is there any setting in the audio decoder to output the sound as compressed Dolby or DTS instead of PCM?

Yep. You would essentially need something in the chain that would transcode the individual audio signals back into a Dolby or DTS bitstream.

This is the same reason why the lossless audio formats found on bluray (TrueHD and Master DTS) require HDMI or multi-channel analog to pass the audio signal. S/PDIF can't hack it

vanilla slimfast fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Feb 6, 2009

vanilla slimfast
Dec 6, 2006

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome



Stabby McDamage posted:

My question: Do I need more CPU power to play these things (despite easily playing a DVD), or do I have some other issue?

DVDs are encoded with MPEG2, which requires very little horsepower to decode. Hulu, AFAIK, uses x264 which requires a LOT of CPU to decode (but is higher quality with lower bandwidth requirements). So this is not a fair comparison

quote:

Hulu performance was fine on my SDTV with my old video card, a GeForce4 MX440, but my screen resolution was 1024x768 at the time. Does video scaling really require the CPU that much? I figured that's something the video card would take care of.

Unless you are using a specific setup of video driver and playback software that offloads processing to the GPU (such as DXVA or VDPAU), no it's all bound to your CPU. There has been a fair amount of discussion about this particular topic earlier in this thread.

Total Meatlove
Jan 28, 2007

:japan:
Rangers died, shoujo Hitler cried ;_;
I have an ITV Digital box that isn't doing anything. Does anyone know of any community/guide for turning it into a HTPC? It seems that it has all of the inputs, a DVB-T decoder and I'm not worried about getting HD, so does anyone know if it's possible?

Visual GNUdio
Aug 27, 2003


evilalien posted:

S/PDIF won't do any more than stereo PCM due to bandwidth limitations. Is there any setting in the audio decoder to output the sound as compressed Dolby or DTS instead of PCM?
Holy crap I knew this and didn't even think of it. My other PC has DD Live which was what was confusing me, as it will output 6 channel just fine. Thanks for your help on this.

It looks like the solution is to continue transcoding everything to AC3 in MKV (which is fine by me) or to buy a new receiver that can do WMAPro (which is also fine by me, not as fine by my wife.) Thanks guys!

Huge_Midget
Jun 6, 2002

I don't like the look of it...
Ok, so I was going through some spare computer parts, and realized I probably have everything I need to build a HTPC. Here is what I have:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo Core (it has the 2x 1 Megabyte L2 cache) This chip can be easily overclocked to 4800+ speeds.
RAM: 4 gigs of generic DDR
Motherboard: As-of-yet unidentified Socket 939 board from an eMachine. It appears to be a rebranded Foxconn of some sort.
Video: BFG nVidia 8800 GT
Hard drive(s): I have several SATA 300 gig drives laying around, I also have a pair of Western Digital 74 gigabyte 10k RPM Raptors that I was thinking about RAIDing for minimal IO lag.
Sound: Soundblaster X-Fi


I guess the first thing I need to do is put this poo poo together to see if it still works. Then I need to figure out what motherboard this is. If I want to hook this up to my Pioneer 1018, I'm guessing I'll have to get a DVI to HDMI adapter and then run the multi-channel analog audio to the multi-channel analog inputs on my Pio receiver? I've been kicking around the idea of getting a Western Digital WDTV or a Popcorn hour, if this proves to be too much of a pain in the rear end I might just break down and get the PCH.

vanilla slimfast
Dec 6, 2006

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome



Huge_Midget posted:

I guess the first thing I need to do is put this poo poo together to see if it still works. Then I need to figure out what motherboard this is. If I want to hook this up to my Pioneer 1018, I'm guessing I'll have to get a DVI to HDMI adapter and then run the multi-channel analog audio to the multi-channel analog inputs on my Pio receiver? I've been kicking around the idea of getting a Western Digital WDTV or a Popcorn hour, if this proves to be too much of a pain in the rear end I might just break down and get the PCH.

Does the motherboard have S/PDIF digital audio out (optical or coax)? You could run that as a single cable to the receiver instead of using the analog multi-outs

TheScott2K
Oct 26, 2003

I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

vanilla slimfast posted:

DVDs are encoded with MPEG2, which requires very little horsepower to decode. Hulu, AFAIK, uses x264 which requires a LOT of CPU to decode (but is higher quality with lower bandwidth requirements). So this is not a fair comparison


Unless you are using a specific setup of video driver and playback software that offloads processing to the GPU (such as DXVA or VDPAU), no it's all bound to your CPU. There has been a fair amount of discussion about this particular topic earlier in this thread.

Hulu and its ilk (I'll lump silverlight-netflix in with it) seem to have difficulties other than those inherent to h.264 versus MPEG2. On my Athlon X2 4200 full-screen 480p Hulu gets choppy and that machine plays 1080p mkv's and BluRays without a hitch. Same goes for a similarly-specced machine elsewhere in the house. I really wish I could figure out why and how to fix it, but hopefully the Core2Duo I ordered this morning will fix things. I do find it odd that the internet as a whole is moving to a video streaming format that really does seem to demand a lot more power to get exactly the same result as if they'd just continued using streaming wmv or something similar, only with worse scaling and nonexistent MoComp.

Mr. Eric Praline
Aug 13, 2004
I didn't like the others, they were all too flat.
Anyone have experience with the Asus Xonar HDAV1.3 sound card? Apparently it can bitstream all the HD audio codecs via HDMI. I can't find any reviews or experiences with it. I realize it's brand-new hardware, but I'd like to get some opinions before I buy it.

Right now, TotalMedia is sending LPCM over HDMI to the reciever. It works pretty well, but video occasionally stutters on really "active" scenes. (doesn't happen with SPDIF and dolby/dts) Besides, I'd rather have my receiver do the decoding and take any processing off the CPU entirely. As far as I can tell, the Asus is the only one that is HDMI 1.3 compliant and can bitstream the audio.


Some specific questions about the card:
Does it work with the retail TotalMedia Theater, or would I have to stick with the bundled version? Does it actually work as expected? Are there any problems switching between codecs or applications? Does using the video HDMI passthrough cause any problems? It looks like there's a huge heatsink, is there also a noisy fan?

Edit: Looks like I found most of my answers:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1055454

Mr. Eric Praline fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Feb 6, 2009

Stabby McDamage
Dec 11, 2005

Doctor Rope

TheScott2K posted:

Hulu and its ilk (I'll lump silverlight-netflix in with it) seem to have difficulties other than those inherent to h.264 versus MPEG2. On my Athlon X2 4200 full-screen 480p Hulu gets choppy and that machine plays 1080p mkv's and BluRays without a hitch. Same goes for a similarly-specced machine elsewhere in the house. I really wish I could figure out why and how to fix it, but hopefully the Core2Duo I ordered this morning will fix things. I do find it odd that the internet as a whole is moving to a video streaming format that really does seem to demand a lot more power to get exactly the same result as if they'd just continued using streaming wmv or something similar, only with worse scaling and nonexistent MoComp.

I agree, and I think I'm in the same boat. That machine has played 1080p H264 before with CCCP's ffdshow, which isn't the fastest thing ever.

In the near term, I was able to solve it by bumping it down to 720p output, which fixes Hulu and makes NetFlix stutter only once in a while.

Since it works on my C2D workstation at high resolution, I'm probably going to upgrade with this stuff, which is pretty cheap. Hopefully I'll have enough breathing room to underclock the thing and save some power.

Severed
Jul 9, 2001

idspispopd
It looks like I'll need to replace the video card in my current setup. I primarily use my htpc for watching dvds, recording TV, and playing PSone/n64 emulators. I'm thinking of getting one of these two cards:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102812

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162026

The ATI 2400HD Pro I like because it has a passive cooling system, as I've had fans die on my cards in this particular system. Although the second card is probably faster... but by how much and would I even notice a speed increase? The highest resolution I'll ever have this thing hooked up in will be 720p.

Vykk.Draygo
Jan 17, 2004

I say salesmen and women of the world unite!
Does anybody know if MediaPortal and Vista Media Center can be set up as two seperate devices on a Harmony remote to easily switch between them? As it stands now, the only IR receiver I have is the one that plugs into my Hauppauge tuner which works great (though a little laggy) in mediaportal, but if I want to run VMC, I have to shut down MediaPortal, run the Hauppauge WinTV IR software, then manually open VMC. I'm just wondering if, by buying a new IR receiver, I can start and run VMC just by changing devices on my remote?

TheScott2K
Oct 26, 2003

I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.
http://www.geektonic.com/2009/02/hauppauge-hd-pvr-on-media-center.html

Geektonic posted:

Wouldn't you know, it wasn't Microsoft that brings Hauppauge HD-PVR support to Media Center - instead it was the crafty user-developers who hacked together a solution for us. Yes it's true, Media Center users can now use Hauppauge HD-PVR with their Media Center software!

All TV Channels including those Encrypted Thanks to the "Analog Hole"
For those two of you who don't know the significance of this, the Hauppauge HD-PVR allows you to take your cable box or satellite box and connect it to your computer to tune live and recorded TV to your media center. [Read More about the Hauppauge HD-PVR here]. That includes HD, SD, encrypted or not thanks to the HD-PVR's use of the analog hole. The HD-PVR can take any component out and convert the analog stream into h.264 video with AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital Sound.

DVBSBridge ADD-ON PROGRAM FOR MEDIA CENTER
The hack uses DVBSBridge which was originally designed to enable DVB-S channels in Vista Media center and XP MCE 2005. The new HD-PVR functionality for DVBSBridge adds the following features:

* High-Definition H.264 Video with AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital Sound
* Set-top box control from Media Center though HD-PVR's own IR Blaster
* All the goods that Windows Media Center has to offer... DRM free!

System Requirements

* Windows 7 or a Windows Media Center with H.264 support for Live TV
* For SDTV (480i) capture, H.264 decoding using a software-only codec might be enough, depending of your CPU
* For HDTV (1080i/720p) capture, H.264 decoding might requires hardware accelerated codec, since your processor might not be able to cope with the decoding of the stream. As a result, Media Center’s rendering might starts lagging frames

NOTE: Windows Media Center uses different codecs depending on the H.264 input source. The Live TV/Recorded TV uses Microsoft’s own codec and external media (AVI, MKV) uses the codecs from DirectShow. Note that under Windows Vista TV Pack, the H.264 hardware acceleration is restricted and thus we recommend using Windows 7 for HDTV usage.

MORE INFORMATION AND DOWNLOAD
You can view the entire DVBSBridge procedures here: http://dvblogic.com/download/Manuals/dvbsbridge_pd_configuration.pdf

For more information on DVBSBridge, check out their forums at www.dvbsbridge.com
Download the HDPVRBridge program here and let me know how it works for you! Thanks to GhostLobster for the tip!

NOTE: Their server is getting hit pretty hard right now so it could take you a while to get the download.

poo poo just got more viable. I don't have one so I can't test it out, which sucks because I'm actually running Windows 7. Aargh what unfortunate timing to have just spent that $200.

Severed
Jul 9, 2001

idspispopd
Anyone have experience using EmuCenter? I installed it and configured it to find my emulators, but for some reason its not showing up in my Vista Media Center at all. What do I need to do?

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SuperCaptainJ
Jun 24, 2005

Severed posted:

Anyone have experience using EmuCenter? I installed it and configured it to find my emulators, but for some reason its not showing up in my Vista Media Center at all. What do I need to do?

Did you use the Menu Editor to add it?

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/255723.aspx

SuperCaptainJ fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Feb 8, 2009

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