what is needed for BBC HD?

memmerson · 24-06-2006, 10:06 AM

Indeed. In fact AFAIK this channel switching bug affects all CoreAVC/DVBViewer GE (pro?) users and will be fixed in the next release of CoreAVC due out soon...

Poissony · 24-06-2006, 10:08 AM

Pentium Dual Core 2.8Ghz
1Gb DDR400 RAM
PCI-Express Nvidia 6600 with 91.31 Drivers
CoreAVC Pro 1.1
DVBViewer GE
Nebula PCI DVB-T Card

FPS: 25 (deblocking off, software de-interlacing - the colours are wrong when I use Directx de-interlacing).

Even with an average frame rate of 25, on fast motion (i.e football) there is an occasional stutter/judder when viewing live. When watching recordings in Media Player Classic it's near perfect. I've tried streaming from DVBviewer (Pro edition as GE doesn't have this facility) to MPC but I get occasional blocking, which is worse than the judder.

Waiting for the CoreAVC update which corrects problem with DVBViewer, it's taking longer than expected to be released though...

MarkSS · 24-06-2006, 11:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Poissony

FPS: 25 (deblocking off, software de-interlacing - the colours are wrong when I use Directx de-interlacing).

I had the wrong colours problem for a while but it went away when i deleted all the dvbviewer settings and set it up again from scratch. That was with Purevideo.

Poissony · 24-06-2006, 2:46 PM

Hmmm, do you see a performance difference between software de-interlacing and directx de-interlacing? I'm loathe to start again when I have it working OK if there's not much improvement.

MarkSS · 24-06-2006, 3:07 PM

Did some more playing around today with the last (84.21) and latest (91.31) Nvidia drivers.

84.21, DirectX de-interlacing, YV12/YUY2 output
= perfect playback

91.31, DirectX de-interlacing, YV12 output
= smooth but colours are messed up

91.31, DirectX de-interlacing, YUY2 output
= audio lag (quickly rises to 3 seconds), video buffers in DVBSource increase to 1000 then a skip occurs

With either version software deinterlacing or no deinterlacing is not smooth enough to be watchable.

New drivers work better for my main TV app, SageTV. Old drivers are only option for watching World Cup in HD.

Poissony · 24-06-2006, 4:34 PM

That's very interesting thanks for the info. I may have a play before the next footall match tonight by rolling back to 84.21 drivers and trying directx then.

Poissony · 24-06-2006, 5:28 PM

Well, rolling back to 84.41 drivers has made the difference. I'd already installed 91.31 drivers when CoreAVC 1.1 was released so never thought to try the earlier drivers. I can now use directshow de-interlace option in CoreAVC with no colour problems and the playback of live broadcasts is the smoothest I've had

mickbarlow · 24-06-2006, 10:06 PM

even though fraps reports a perfect frame rate, the video isnt quite right. i can work out what it it though.

looks like its playing in fast foward, but its obviously not...

anybody else experiencing this?

Poissony · 24-06-2006, 10:14 PM

Yeah, what you describe is pretty much what I was experiencing until I did what I said I did above.

mickbarlow · 25-06-2006, 9:25 PM

no use to me im afraid, im running ati radeon 9600 with catalyst 6.5 drivers.

lisag · 26-06-2006, 9:37 AM

Asus A8N VM CSM, Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB DDR333, Terratec 2400i, Core AVC and DVB Viewer.

I got to watch the whole of the England match in glorious HD - very smooth playback and no crashes

nigelbb · 26-06-2006, 9:58 AM

Oddly enough despite CoreAVC not using any hardware acceleration from the graphics card it does appear that choice of graphics card & driver is very important. It appears that people are having much more success with Nvidia than ATI even with motherboard integrated graphics.

I get very decent pictures & sound on BBC HDTV with an Athlon XP 2000+ & FX5200 graphics card using CoreAVC & DVBViewer (Pro & GE) fed from my Technotrend TT-1500S DVB-S card. The frame rate is a bit slow though so it's not really watchable (still haven't figure out how to use FRAPS to measure the framrate).

Being encouraged by the unexpectedly good performance of the Athlon system I tried my 3GHz P4 SFF system with Intel 845 chipset & integrated Intel Extreme graphics. Normal DVB-S reception was fine with less than 15% CPU utilisation. The BBC HDTV picture was very poor with the 16:9 image squashed into 4:3 & then random colour noise either side. The frame rate was very poor too. I tried giving the graphics more memory & overclocking the CPU to 3.2GHz without success.

Next I tried adding an ATI Radeon 9200 LE 128MB graphics card. This improved the picture quality greatly so there were no longer flaws unfortunately the frame rate was worse than with the Athlon & the sound track quickly started lagging by several seconds.

My next attempt at avoiding having to buy a whole new system will be to try the P4 system with the Nvdia FX5200 & TT-1500 card thus ruling out the variables of graphics & TV card.

sofa-spud · 26-06-2006, 4:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Poissony

Even with an average frame rate of 25, on fast motion (i.e football) there is an occasional stutter/judder when viewing live. When watching recordings in Media Player Classic it's near perfect. I've tried streaming from DVBviewer (Pro edition as GE doesn't have this facility) to MPC but I get occasional blocking, which is worse than the judder.

I experienced the same issue you describe using 91.31 beta.
I've just DL'd and installed 91.31 which apears to be a release rather than beta (latest dated 23 June) and the playback on the football is much smoother now

Quote:

Originally Posted by Poissony

Waiting for the CoreAVC update which corrects problem with DVBViewer, it's taking longer than expected to be released though...

They did well to get MBAFF high profile support rolled out so quickly, but it seems to have slowed down unfortunately. An update posting on their own forum would help rather than appearing to ignore everthing there.

I find coreAVC is giving inferior performance to Pdvd7 using DVBviewer at present.

John

Poissony · 26-06-2006, 7:48 PM

Unfortunately 91.31 drivers (beta or final) don't work as well as 84.43 for me, so, I'll stick with them.

nigelbb · 27-06-2006, 2:05 PM

I have tried some more testing with my 3GHz SFF system. It has 1GB RAM & I also installed an Nvdia FX5200 graphics card plus a technotrend Budget TT-1500 DVB-S card. This time the resulst were much better than with the ATI RAdeon 9200. I did find that the driver version 84.43 worked much better for me than 91.31.

It's very frustrating as it _almost_ works perfectly. It works fine for 10 seconds then there is a little glitch on the sound & the picture freezes for a second or 2 then it continutes playing fine. Unfortunately the audio drifts further & further behind the video. DVBViewer gives me one option of the BBC HD channel without audio & this works fine. I suppsoe for the footbal that I could play the BBC Radio Five Live commentary from a separate system but that's not an option for Bleak House or Planet Earth:-)

I even tried overclocking to 3.22GHz but still there was not trouble free playback. I get much the same performance whether I use DVBViewer GE 2.01 or DVBViewer Pro 3.5. I use CoreAVC 1.1 for the H.264 decoding & AC3Filter 1.1 for the audio. If I watch the CPU utilisation in Task Manager I see that DVBViewer runs at 95-98% & then when there is a glitch drops down to about 30% then back up to 98%. It uses less than 90MB of memory & Page Faults moderately. Obviously from other reports the problems can be fixed by a fast enough CPU but I have a feeling that if instabilities & inefficiencies in DVBViewer CoreAVC & AC3Filter were fixed that I could have perfect playback on my setup.

My last resort will be to lug the Dell Workstation into the lounge as this has a 3.4GHz P4 with EMT64 plus an ATI Radeon X1300. I have been putting this off as the system fans are so loud I will have to crank up the amplifier volume to drown them out:-) If that system doesn't cut the mustard then I guess that I will have to get together parts list for a system that will do the job. It's shame as I don't really need a new system at present & upgrading my current HTPC will involve almost complete replacement of components e.g. motherboard, graphics card, memory, S-ATA vs. P-ATA disks etc.

Poissony · 27-06-2006, 2:32 PM

Nigel, it may be worthwhile holding out for the CoreAVC update which supposedly cures the problems DVBViewer has with CoreAVC.

Have you tried something like TSReader streamed to VLC or MPC to see if it's an issue with DVBViewer or not?

mickbarlow · 28-06-2006, 8:50 AM

surely a video card with h264 hardware decoding would elimintate the need for a crazy cpu?

if you planning an upgrade. i'd hang on a month for the new Intel Conroe Core 2 next month...

nigelbb · 28-06-2006, 4:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mickbarlow

surely a video card with h264 hardware decoding would elimintate the need for a crazy cpu?

As far as I know none of the available players &/or CODECs actually take advantage of any h264 hardware decoding available with either ATI or Nvidia graphics cards.

Rack · 29-06-2006, 1:19 PM

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2645&p=2

Looks like ATI does.

http://blog.pcnews.ro/2006/01/24/int...idia-hardware/

and Nvidia

Whether any of this works with HDTV broadcasts coming into other programs? don't know.

Rack · 29-06-2006, 2:45 PM

How far do people here live from the transmitter?? I'm hoping to set this up tonight for the weekend matches. I looked it up, I'm about 8miles away... Somehow I doubt I'll get it, but when I searched using the software from Terratec the BBC HD channel came up and crashed the program.

MikeTV · 29-06-2006, 6:54 PM

I believe you should be able to get it easily, with an outdoor antenna. But I can't confirm that.

lisag · 29-06-2006, 7:36 PM

Agreed - I am about 40 miles away..

RICKYJ · 30-06-2006, 12:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lisag

run the batch file in /Filters

I am a little confused by this comment, can someone explain this, sorry for my ignorence.

Ricky

nigelbb · 03-07-2006, 7:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by R10KYJ

I am a little confused by this comment, can someone explain this, sorry for my ignorence.

Ricky

There is a .bat file in the Filters subdirectory of DVBViewer GE that registers a DirectShow filter necessary for DVBViewer. This step is not required if you have already installed DVBViewer Pro.

nigelbb · 03-07-2006, 8:16 AM

Just a quick update to let everyone know that I am now enjoying in perfect quality the BBC HD satellite trial. I will post a separate more detailed description of what is required but here are my basic details.

HARDWARE:-
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 AM2 socket
ASUS M2NPV-VM with onboard Nvidia 6150 graphics
1GB Corsair DDR2 memory
Samsung 300GB S-ATA II disk drive
Technotrend Budget TT-1500 DVB-S card
Hercules Fortissimo IV (the motherboard has onboard sound but doesn't ship with an SPDIF optical/digital outlet & I am waiting for delivery of the necessary widget)

SOFTWARE:-
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with all the updates (50+!!!)
DVBViewer Pro 3.5 or DVBViwer GE 2.0.1.0 (no real difference between the 2 versions)
CoreAVC h.264 CODEC 1.1
ac3filter_1_01a_rc5
Nvidia graphics driver 81.98 (an old version but I had all sorts of problems with various newer versions)

DVBViewer has about 50% CPU utilisation when viewing HD tranmissions. The picture quality is staggeringly good on our Samsung 46" LCD. The 5.1 soundtrack really adds a lot to the whole experience

I am absolutely delighted with the new PC housed in an Antec Sonata case. It is very, very quiet & looks very cool in its piano black case. It's so nice that my wife wants me to build her one to replace her 3GHz P4 SFF system!

a_friend · 03-07-2006, 12:41 PM

I have a problem with CoreAVC I don't get a picture when using it but i do get it when runiing the PowerDVD 7 codec within DVBviewer.

I am using a

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800,
Asus P1-AH1 Barebones
on board Nvidia 6150 latest drivers
1 GB Memory

Happauge Win TV Nova-T USB2

I purchased the standard version of CoreAVC

I get the same problem when using CoreAVC on my Acer laptop travel mate 8103 which has a ATI x700 GFX card

si_dee_oli · 03-07-2006, 3:24 PM

I understand you can only do this if you live in the London area....on Freeview.

Is this still the case via a pc.. or can the pc recieve a broader distance... (im in Northampton)

Sorry if this is a stupid question

Si

Poissony · 03-07-2006, 5:29 PM

Lisa is receiving it 40 miles away but Northampton is double that so I doubt it. If you have DVB-T card in your PC already you could try scanning for the BBCHD channel and seeing if your card picks it up. That should be your first step.

Lord Biggington · 04-07-2006, 12:53 PM

Great thread just discovered.

After scanning successfully for BBCHD I have immediately purchased DVBViewer. Trying to buy CoreAVC but keep on getting an error, the site seems to be down. Can anyone else confirm this. I have been trying

http://coreavc.corecodec.org/ and
http://www.coreavc.com

Thanks
Dan

Poissony · 04-07-2006, 1:44 PM

Yeah the site is down, in the meantime you could try the Powerdvd 7 trial and see how you get on.