Compro E900F dual hybrid tuner in Vista WMC

[dblyth2007]

Hi,


I've gone through a number of USB tuners in the past from TwinHain and Pinnicle and wasn't too impressed with the quality. So this time I decided to pay a little more and buy the Compro E900F dual tuner for all the reasons that appear on the box; watch one channel while recording another, 1080i HD picture, PCIe interface, new Philips chip on board for encoding, etc.


Once I got past some of the quirks, like buying arial splitters, adapters and such to feed my roof-top signal into both of the cards tuner inputs, I was eventually up and running.

I have a few issues:


1) Video Quality.


Why is it I can get a better picture with a cheap super market freeview box and an old TV then anything I pass through a PC ?

The basic problem is how blocky the video image appears to be. Its like a low bit rate Video CD. I used the application 'ScanChannelsBDA_UK' to verify I was getting 100% quality on all channels.


The video image is not jumping or loosing frames (I don't think), its just the basic quality. I'm viewing this on the DELL 24" wide screen connected via the DVI output on the graphics card.


I wondered if there was something I'm missing; deblocking methods, codecs, registry settings, advanced hidden options somewhere ?


2) WMC Watch one channel and record another


I'm finding that WMC locks up if I try to record the current channel and then move to another. I need to use the Task Manager to kill it. The ComproDTV software can do this, but its a pretty bad piece of software with a near useless EPG.


3) Resources:


Two WMC services now run from start-up, the Receiver and Scheduler service, each taking between 40-80% of both CPUs. I'm finding I need to disable these if I want to play a game. Any thoughts ?


Maybe I'm expecting too much, but for the price I'm paying I thought I'd at least get a better viewing experience then my standard lounge TV setup. Why do I always find that PC-TV tuners are something to persevere with!


Any help is appreciated.

db2007
UK

DELL C521 Athlon x64 dual core 5000+, 2GB RAM, Galaxy 9600GT 512MB DDR3, Compro E900F dual tuner. Vista Home Premium SP1.

[cdldt]

Blocky video unfortunately is an inherant problem with the low bitrates on Freeview UK. The TV card does not influence the blockyness at all. Some channels are worse than others, particularly channels which broadcast at 544x576 resolution - this will always appear soft on a PC when sat close.
WinTV KB - HVR-2200 Image quality appears soft

The biggest influence for perceived quality is by tweaking display brightness/gamma settings as well as whether your graphics card is using 0-255 or 16-235 for video. 16-235 can appear washed out.

For what it's worth, the E900F should be a good card. It has the latest NXP TDA10048HN demodulator, and in my experience it performs really well in conjunction with the TDA18271 tuners (which I expect it also uses). It is also used on the HVR-1200, HVR-1700 and HVR-2200 as well as on the latest DigitalNow S3 card. On the Australian media centre forum both the HVR-2200 and DNTV S3 have been getting very positive feedback. So I would stick with it.

Have you tried finding updated drivers for the Compro card?

[TimHolloway]

I upgraded from a Compro E700 to the Compro E900F not long after they became available. I use it extensively for both recording Freeview TV under and playback using VMC. Whilst we have a less than ideal Freeview signal I've got excellent results from the card and can quite happily watch TV several feet away from the PC. The picture quality from any of the major channels is always excellent and I often manage to record two programs at the same time AND view a previously recorded program on the same PC without upsetting the recording or playback. In fact I would rate the viewing on the LCD as much better than any standard TV.

As for the drivers I've found that Windows Update has given me the most recent version automatically.

More recently I did get fed up with using my Study as the only way to watch TV and purchased a Panasonic 46" plasma plus a Linksys DMA2100 extender. We now watch all the Compro recorded TV in the lounge and the results are pretty astounding as the recorded SD TV gets up-scaled to an even better picture on the Panasonic.

Admittedly I've got a pretty powerful machine but that aside both of my Compro cards have given excellent results. My only problem is that I've now got Freesat on the TV but can't get it working with Vista 64bit using a Blackgold BGT3540 card at the moment. If you look at the posts I made on testing the BGT3540 you'll also see that the Compro E900F worked in every single one of the many 32bit and 64bit combinations I tried.

Unfortunately I can't see an obvious problem for your poor experience/luck with the card. I'll give it some more thought but in the emantime I thought it might at least help to know that this card can and does work well for others like myself.

Cheers

PS I rarely use it to watch live TV except when testing, but when I do that works fine as well.

[dblyth2007]

Many thanks for the reply.

That makes me feel a little better about the purchase. It is the first PC-TV card I've had that remains stable for as long as I want to watch it. The Pinnicle USB stick I had would only find 75% of the channels and loose the plot after 15 minutes viewing.

However, when I plug my basic Humax set-top box into the same monitor via the composite video connection, I get a much better picture, no obvious pixelated blocks making up the image. Its very much like the nice clear quality image I see on the other TVs around the house where we have the same Humax boxes for freeview.

I do have the dynamic range set to 0-255 in the nVidia control panel and the gamma is also increased for playback of DivX and DVD in Windows media player.

I was hoping there was some way to post process the signal to smooth it out.

I'll continue to persevere with the recording issue, I don't want to have to restore to an old OS image to problem solve possible conflicts, I'd loose all my installed games.

thanks again

[cdldt]

dblyth2007, sorry for hijacking your thread, but I have a question for Tim...

Originally Posted by TimHolloway

I upgraded from a Compro E700 to the Compro E900F not long after they became available.

Tim, how do you find the E900F compared to the E700?

[cdldt]

Originally Posted by dblyth2007

I was hoping there was some way to post process the signal to smooth it out.

As far as I know, the only post-processing you can do is via the Noise Reduction and Edge Enhancement options in ATI and nVidia's control panels. But for the most part the Noise Reduction reduces grain and fine detail rather than deblocking.

[dblyth2007]

Originally Posted by cdldt

But for the most part the Noise Reduction reduces grain and fine detail rather than deblocking.

I spent some time looking into deblocking with DivX and hoped there would be similar technologies available for PC TV. Although my DivX player now crashes on launch after changing the deblocking settings!

I've started a similar thread on the Compro forum, If I get anything useful out of Compro I'll post it here.

[TimHolloway]

cdldt,

The Compro E700 did well and worked very reliably on a SINGLE aerial feed for both tuners whereas the E900F requires dual feeds for some reason unknown to me. That can be a problem if you have to resort to a crude or poor quality splitter particularly in weaker signal areas.

Other than than that the E900F has been rock solid and given excellent video/audio even under strain as indicated in my earlier post i.e. frequent dual same time or overlapped recordings that haven't even been upset by using the PC to watch a previous recording or whatever when it's been recording.

In short the difference isn't massive but it is a definite improvement if you tend to push it and can provide it with dual feeds.

Hope that helps

Panasonic TH-46PZ81B TV, Dell P690, 8 x Xeon 2.66Ghz CPU's, 8Gb RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 4500, Dell 30in LCD monitor @ 2560x1600, 4 SATA & 8 eSATA II drives, Vista Ultimate 64bit, 2 x Linksys 1GB switches, Compro E900F DVB-T card, Blackgold BGT3540 6in1 DVB-S card, DMA2100 etc

[TimHolloway]

Dave,

Glad I didn't just depress you by saying it worked for me but I'm still not sure where to point the finger to help. As you will see from the footer I run a very high resolution on the PC (VMC complains but still works fine when I ignore it) plus 1080p (1920 x 1080) on the TV/Extender. The result on the PC is far better than an SD set and the result on the Panasonic is somewhere between the Dell LCD and live Freesat HD on the Panasonic. Both being way better than standard TV which drives my eyes nuts due to the poor quality.

I also don't see any of the blocky or pixellated picture problem you describe so have to wonder what resolutions, video settings and etc. you have on the PC plus the types/ages of TV. I've certainly been amazed at how well the DMA2100 & Panasonic combination transforms standard Compro E900F SD recordings into a quite remarkably good 46inch full screen picture.

It may also be that I'm not as "fussy" but I doubt it because my ageing eyesight always keeps forcing me to push the envelope in order to get the extra quality and detail I need to enjoy it.

BTW Didn't understand your comment about going back to an "Older OS". All my comments are based on Vista Ultimate 32/64bit with SP1 and SP2 beta. Are you on W7?
_____________________________
Panasonic TH-46PZ81B TV, Dell P690, 8 x Xeon 2.66Ghz CPU's, 8Gb RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 4500, Dell 30in LCD monitor @ 2560x1600, 4 SATA & 8 eSATA II drives, Vista Ultimate 64bit, 2 x Linksys 1GB switches, Compro E900F DVB-T card, Blackgold BGT3540 6in1 DVB-S card, DMA2100 etc

[dblyth2007]

Originally Posted by TimHolloway

BTW Didn't understand your comment about going back to an "Older OS". All my comments are based on Vista Ultimate 32/64bit with SP1 and SP2 beta. Are you on W7?

Hi,

No, I'm on Vista 32-bit home premium. I use 'Acronis True Image' to create more reliable restore points for when things go wrong. I was talking about going back to a clean install, or close to clean anyway.

It may well be that I'm being a bit fussy, sat up close to my monitor. After a bit of research I see that there is a project in XBMC to offload deblocking to the video card GPU, but this seams to be aimed at HD video.

Many thanks

[dblyth2007]

Compro suggested I wait for HD DVB-T for the quality :-( perhaps their right.

[TimHolloway]

Dave,

Thanks for the "clarification" and yes I've also found Acronis a good way of saving and restoring all my test partitions etc. The default Vista stuff is seriously lacking & you've no idea what it's backed up or what it might restore (other than a potential disaster based on unsound increments from when you first ran it with no way to flush and start again without a re-install).

Anyway that aside with my LCD & Graphics card the Compro produces very good results at 2 metres and even more from the LCD for my wife. My personal vision acutely rejects any jitter, refresh rate or low-res problems to the point that I can't/won't watch it.

The results on the Dell LCD have kept us both sane for the last 2 years whilst we've both been really amazed with the improved up-scaled quality of SD recordings streamed to the Panasonic Plasma.

Native HD on that is obviously even better still but the improvement from be the past and the alternatives is very well worth having.

As for HD on DVB-T I wouldn't hold my breath or hopes for anything but HD over Freesat. This works outstandingly well as long as you have a reasonable dish => sky viewpoint. SD and HD are chalk and cheese, your main problem is which of the flavours you can get when and where but typically Freesat looks to be a better bet even if they ever raise the Freeview signal strength.

[dblyth2007]

I'm still looking into the WMC recording crashes. When you launch WMC for the first time and click on live TV, how long does it take to respond and diaplay live tv for you ?

On my old Pinnicle USB stick it would take about 5 seconds, now its takes about 2 minutes!

I also find that from boot-up, two WMC services are running, receiver and scheduler hogging up 40-80% of both CPU cores before I do anything with the machine, before I even launch WMC. Is this normal ?

[TimHolloway]

Originally Posted by dblyth2007

I'm still looking into the WMC recording crashes. When you launch WMC for the first time and click on live TV, how long does it take to respond and diaplay live tv for you ?

On my old Pinnicle USB stick it would take about 5 seconds, now its takes about 2 minutes!

I also find that from boot-up, two WMC services are running, receiver and scheduler hogging up 40-80% of both CPU cores before I do anything with the machine, before I even launch WMC. Is this normal ?

Hi, I've also found some strange and unexplained delays when I've just re-booted between partitions or simply re-started my system. If I go into VMC within a few minutes of either then trying to view Live TV (or record) will create a problem. The recording may initially fail and Live TV may take up to 2-3+minutes to cut in. Once it does all is well but the problem doesn't occur if the system has been up and running for a while before invoking VMC. Having 8 CPU's and 8Gb of RAM doesn't seem to help with whatever it's playing with in the post startup phase.

Cheers