Theater 650 Pro Discussion

[mrceolla]

vddobrev,

thank you, I understand what you are suggesting, but my old DVD-R on the other IDE channel is not ATAPI compatible and will not work w/ a HD on that channel. At least the bios gives me an error with something in that respect.

My initial HD installation, before all this trouble shooting, was

Adaptec 1200A ATA RAID Controller
2x120 RAID-0 (primary slave, secondary slave) system
2x160 RAID-0 (primary master, secondary master) storage

When I had all these random glitches with the RAIDs, I thought maybe it was a hardware conflict w/ the 650 and the RAID controller. So I then took the RAID out and started using the onboard IDE.

I could try a RAID again, but given my first setup, I don't think it is HD bandwidth issues. I dunno.

Any other suggestions?

What are ffdshow and ReClock? I've seen mention of them often but little discussion on what they actually do. Could these help my problem?

Thanks,
Mike

[mrceolla]

To add to my troubles, I came home today after leaving MCE and ATI's TV on all day. The audio was very out of sync. I went back a few seconds and then let it play, and audio was back in sync. Further more, audio continues to loose sync at much more frequent basis. I tried restarting MCE only to fix the audio sync issue, but it came back rather quickly. I have since rebooted and have yet to see if the reboot temporarily fixes the audio sync problem.

Is it safe to assume that if I can smoothly replay footage that, on the first time through, showed a glitch, that my problem is a playback problem NOT related to the 650 or the recording of the 650's output?

Thanks,
Mike

[denyart]

Yes, it is safe to assume it is more to do with play back than recording. You can use TweakMCE to set playback so it will drop frames to keep audio in sync. As for the little stutters, I get them but they are not often or severe enough for me to try to figure out why. I sometimes rewind it to see of it was due to playback or whether it was caught in the recording. About half of mine are actually in the recording. I watched some TV at the inlaws over the holidays, and there is an amazing amount of stutters and pixelation on regular old analog TV, so sometimes my computer isn't probably to blame at all. If you are getting a lot of little stutters you may look into optimizing your system with a clean install and just one MPEG2 decoder (whichever seems to work the best for you). Also, I have found it takes a few goes at a MCE setup to find most of the little bugs and get rid of them. I had such a setup, but then I switched to a new pair of analog tuners to get better picture quality and found some new bugs. Good luck tracking this down and I hope it can be fixed for you.

[vddobrev]

SUCCESS!!! I was able to workaround it! This is the unofficial workaraound for ATI 650 standby problem:


1. Download DevCon http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272/ and extract it to C:\devcon
2. Download HibernateTrigger http://www.rpi.edu/~desimn/suspendtrigger/ and install it.
3. If ATI 650 are the only ATI cards in your system, skip to step 5.
4. If you have other ATI cards in your system, you may want to restart only the 650 tuners. For this, open command line window and run: devcon find PCI\* - this will produce a list of all local devices. Find ATI Unified AVStream Driver, and note the device IDs for your 2 tuners. In step 5, replace PCI\VEN_1002* with a similar string that will identify only the ATI 650 tuners.
5. Create C:\devcon\ati650.bat file with the following contents:

net stop "Media Center Receiver Service"
devcon restart PCI\VEN_1002*
net start "Media Center Receiver Service"

6. Open HibernateTriger, and type C:\devcon\ati650.bat in what you want to execute on resume.

Enjoy dual ATI 650 with stand by support!!!

Credit goes to denyart and hveijk!

[vddobrev]

New drivers: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/m...er550-mce.html

[mrceolla]

Thanks for the heads up on the new drivers. I've installed them, but I've still got the same problems.

AC3filter wouldn't be causing this would it? Is there any other way to get AC3 from MCE?

If I select my preferred coded from the codec checkup utility, can I be sure that is the codec being used, even if I do not uninstall the other codecs?

If not, how does one uninstall a codec.

I've got another issue I didn't mention before. Everytime I start TV for the first time after a boot, all I get is a little frozen image in the upper left corner of my screen. If I minimize and then maximize MCE, the image will display and play in full screen. Anyone have this before? This happens regardless of if my prefferred codec is purevideo or cyberlink.

Thanks,
Mike

[vddobrev]

Mike, have you considered the problem is outside your box and in the signal? Have you downloaded 1080p content from HD showcase and played it? Try it and let us know.
Why do you need AC3? What is the sound card? Onboard? Can it not pass thru digital? Have you gone thru MCE setup to setup your speakers - there are options to select the type of connection used?

[vddobrev]

BTW, I used to have the infamous fwd/back/skip problem back when I was using Beyond TV.

[mrceolla]

I can not find any settings in MCE regarding using SPDIF out. I only see speaker number selection.

Yes, I am using the onboard audio's digital out. I had attempted my initial MCE w/o AC3filter but could not find a way to get digital audio out from MCE. CMC would output digital audio...when the program worked.

I will try some of those HD clips now.

[vddobrev]

After the speaker number, there is a conection type - Single Coax, Optical, etc.

[mrceolla]

I don't get that option. After the speaker number selection, it goes straight to "Test."

I've d/l some HD clips and will test them tomorrow. I'll report back my findings.

[denyart]

It sounds like you may have a big mess with all of your audio filters and decoders. I know MCE will remove some options of the audio setup based on decoders. If you don't see the option to set up SPDIF passthrough, then you probably need to clean up some decoders and filters. This can be realllllly tricky since they don't always uninstall cleanly. I would try just one DVD (mpeg2) decoder and see what you get. I have had the best luck with the NVidia decoder, but YMMV. I would definitely think you can get your native DD and DTS out if your motherboard has SPDIF. It is just an issue with the current software you have on board.

[mrceolla]

Say, who here knows what the "intel chipset software installation utility" is? I realized I forgot to install that in the beginning of my build, and then installed it after everything was installed. I then re-installed the 650 and the nVidia drivers. Things kinda went crazy after that. The nvidia drivers didn't install 'til after the reboot, then the driver install program launched itself...twice. Then I got a popup notifying me of a plug n play monitor that was detected (my Sony HD TV [dvi to hdmi]). That didn't happen before. I'm either kidding myself or I'm seeing improvment.

Big question here. If the ati 650 is recording something while I'm watching something (which basically happens whenever you watch live tv) and it runs into a signal strength problem, can that affect the current playback due to system or bus strain?

I ask because sometimes I get those glitches, but upon second review after rewinding the footage, the footage plays smoothly.

My HDTV signal strength meter shows upper 80's and some upper 90's and usually has no trouble with the signal. Is it safe to say the ati tuner isn't as good as my TVs tuner?

Is there a utility out there somewhere that'll give me good signal strength readings from the ati 650?

Thanks folks. I feel like I'm either close to getting it working or close to returning it.

Mike

[vddobrev]

Intel Chipset Software is essential to correctly configuring your board. It should be installed first before other drivers, but its not fatal to install it afterwards - http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/inf/index.htm

If you are watching a recorded show, and recording another at the same time, you may [however unlikely with SATA drive] hit the limit of your hard drive throughput. Another recording's signal strength cannot affect the program being watched at the moment.

You may have other CPU intensive processes kicking in [e.g. antivirus scans, windows update, etc.] when you get those glitches. When this happens, open task manager and see whats eating your CPU cycles.

In general a TV's tuner will be better than a PC TV tuner card.

Signal strength reading is not reliable on the ATI 650 - it does not necessarily mean the signal is poor.

[denyart]

I also would add that little glitches in playback can happen even when you think you have everything nailed down. Even set top box devices have occasional glitches (and they aren't usually doing much else). You may have something wrong, but it is hard to sya an occasional glitch will ever go away do to the complexity of these systems. I am not saying you should expect something poor and hard to watch, but it is hard to really understand how bad these glitches your describing really are. If they are as minor as the ones I have you may be doing good already. I do also remember having trouble using AC3 filter on my system. I was able to leave it installed, but I had to configure it a bit to keep my spdif passthrough working. The only reason I installed it was for DD and DTS on some of my XVID movies. I am going to reencode them sometime into WMV so I won't need AC3 filter anymore. Also, if you have AC3 filter attemoting to encode all sounds from the computer into DD, that could cause some problems. I always disabled that option since it never seemed to do anything good for my system.

Now onto standby issues. I still have a problem. If I use the procedure outlined earlier, it doesn't work. If I go and manually run the batch file a while after the resume, it goes through the restarting of the drivers and sometimes fixes it. Other times I end up with two "working" tuners, but one of them doesn't properly tune the channels and gives a lot of static. I can't seem to understand why Hibernate Trigger isn't doing the restart the same as when I click on the batch file. If I watch it, it looks like it is doing it, but the screen closes before I can read everything. Also, the HDTV Wonder has a different PCI Ven code, so it can still use the 1002* setting without touching it. Is there anything specific you need to do to make it work on your system? I have tried it with Media Center not running when I put it to standby, and also with it runing and playing TV and not playing TV. I get errors with the tuners on resume each way. Sometimes it says it is a disk error. Other times it is the standard Cannot ...tune the channel or something like that.

[mrceolla]

I rebuilt my media center again. This time installing the intel chipset inf stuff right after MCE install, but before rollup 2. This time I was asked if I was using digital audio among other options. I did not get this before. I am now getting digital 5.1 through media center w/o ac3filter, but whenever I pause, rewind, or fastforward tv/recorded TV I loose audio. If I minimize MCE, audio comes back.

Any idea about this?

I now blame most of my playback issues on me not installing the intel chipset thing right away, and tv signal strength. I'm not surprised that these reworked cards are still picky with broadcast reception.

I haven't given up on this card yet, but can anyone here recommend anything else. All I need is a digital TV tuner. I don't need any analog input and don't even need analog tv reception. When talking DTV, does this card's fancy 3D comb filter and such even come into play? Any other cards out there produce an as good as or better picture than this one for DTV?

Thanks again for all the input.