Anyone else installed the emerald update?

[Spacecat]

i installed the emerald update yesterday, seems ok but nothing major that i can tell.

a few extra gubbins here and there, picture seems clearer/sharper (could be my imagination)

anyone else done it and what is you experience of it

[ijd]

havent a clue what your talking about, so i guess not

[lisag]

Not available yet -where did you get it from?

[monopole]

Are there any additional zoom modes? I'd like to see a "just" mode like on panasonic TVs. In this mode, when viewing 4:3 material on a widescreen display, the image is zoomed in a wee bit and then stretched to fit the widescreen display - but it does it by stretching the edges more than the centre. The result is pretty good and perfect for significant others who don't understand aspect ratios no matter how many times you explain it to them.

[Werner]

re the "just mode", if you have the cyberlink powerdvd codecs for mce installed it adds an additional entry to "more programs" allowing you to configure the decoder. You will find a video mode and audio mode selection tool...there is an option called CLEV (CyberLink EagleVision) which does exactly what you describe..

[Spacecat]

hope this isnt a repeat post

you can get the final emerald from the usual places (why wait?)
i use the power dvd codec and it does have the extra zoom function in MCE

[ijd]

what is it and do i need it?????

[lisag]

Its a service pack for MCE - it will be available via windows update soon, there are some versions available now, but not too sure if they are the final release or beta's.

It is supposed to improve stability and fix a few bugs.

lisa

[tartan_guru]

I installed this on Friday (from a link on thegreenbutton)

The update seems to have fixed the biggest issue that I was having with MCE i.e. the loss of guide listings for certain channels when using DVB-T and has also added the ability to listen to and record the freeview radio services.

To make sure that the update went smoothly, I reset my MCE setup (there are various apps for doing this- see thegreenbutton.com), and then re-ran the MCE setup wizard.
After scanning for channels, MCE found all of the TV and Radio services and assigned EPG listings to them (before the update you had to add these manually and it would keep "losing" the listings.
I have been recording radio programmes without any issues, although they show up as TV recordings rather than being under the Radio tab in the main MCE menu.

The update also adds a fourth zoom option, which does a partial stretch of a 4:3 image to fit a 16:9 screen, i.e. keeps the center normal but progressively stretches the image as you head out towards the sides.

[ijd]

thanks for that lisa, so i dont need it yet, time to update my pc,

[jimbob19]

I added this update last night , and then after ten minutes had to back it out with system restore

Whilst watching live TV it was giving problems with previous frame flickering on top of newest frame : every 2-3 minutes or so . May just need newer drivers compatible with the rollup for my PVR350 and Geforce6600 - think I'll wait

[Spacecat]

After having for a few days its seems totally stable, all progs are recordingand going in and out of standby as needed and there is a definite improvement to an already good picture, it seems more solid and defined somehow.
The missus commented on it without being prompted unlike the usual 'what do you think of this', 'yes dear its looks great!'

[fallwood]

Installed yesterday, all went smoothly and no probs so far, cant really see any major differences apart from the extra zoom mode.

[jon stallard]

So let me get this right. If you download this Emerald thing, you can then access the Radio stations? And people are asking if they need it?

The other zoom mode sounds like panarama mode to me as 'fitted' on most of my LCD TV's. Personally, I think it's total sh*te but each to their own. After all, I've just spent far more than I really ought to have on some HTPC's, LCD TV's and sound systems, I don't really then want to deliberately distort the image... Alcohol does that already

Jon.

[Slinkoff]

Installed fine. No really significant differences, only visible one is the extra zoom mode and the new icons to describe each zoom.

Bit disappointed that they haven't improved the speed of the music database. Still takes a while to load in 1200 albums and that's with a 3ghz cpu and 2gig of ram but it is marginally faster. My biggest gripe is that they haven't sorted out the searh feature on large databases. I'm still getting seemingly random results when pressing the first couple of letters of an album title using the number buttons on the remote which is very very annoying and this should be working correctly as a basic requirement of a media library. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I can only put it down to the number of albums confusing MCE. I was hoping this would be sorted.

One improvement is that when hitting play over an album it starts playing a lot quicker. This is the most notable difference but might not be apparent to people with smaller music collections.

I've not used any other media for comparisons so I don't know if the slow database performance is par for the course with 1200 albums or whether there are other players out there that could handle it much better.