MCE 2005 on shuttle SN41G2 v1 video errors with onboard Nvidia geforce4 mx

I built this shuttle system 2 years ago and have been really impressed with it, with an AMD athlon 2500 and 1Gb ram its a powerful machine. a little noisy but reliable and very effective with two monitors!

I recently decided to upgrade to OEM Windows XP MCE 2005, the XP part runs great runs fine, Media player 10 can play music and videos fine. When I load the Media Center app (I have the remote... v.useful) an error pops up "Your video card or drivers are not compatible with media center." But media center continues to load and will play music, but refuses to play any videos. This even prevents the setup completing fully.

I have no desire in buying a graphics card as the one onboard is great for everything else i do.

I saw on another forum, that users of the SN41G2 range had solved this problem on MCE 2004 by updating the bios shared RAM to 64Mb, but this has had no effect, neither has 128Mb.

I have not installed a TV tuner but I can't see why that should be a problem... I have an avermedia TV PCI card but its not great quality and i doubt it works!

After hours of settings changing I discovered the windows own driver for Graphics card works no errors but disables some of the more useful features of the card. I can't find an nvidia update that works with MCE 2005 however.

MCE 2005 seems very useful, the ability to play all my x-vids and music is great, but it isn't built for compatibility...

has anyone had the same problem and sorted it?

Any ideas on the best ways to get the most out of MCE 2005?

which TV tuner are worth getting (esp. on a budget?) my old avermedia was pretty naff quality and slowed my pc right down. does having Mpeg II onboard slow the computer down as much? how about tv recording in the background. am i better with an all-in-one digibox with 40Gb disk?

i am open to any ideas or thoughts my spec are below:

Shuttle SN41G2 V1
AMD 2500 athlon barton core (at 1.83mhz)
2x crucial 512Mb RAM
Maxor 200Gb HHD
2x 19" monitors using NVIDIA geforce4 MX Integrated GPU on 6.6.9.3 drivers
Onboard Nvidia 5.1 SPDIF Optical sound output. via SONY 5.1 home cinema.

What revision of the graphics drivers are you running as MCE 2005 is running fine on my system with the lastest detonator drivers.

As for TV cards - there are a few PVR style cards that work such as the hauppauge PVR150MCE, 250 and 500 but these are not freeview (digital) they are infact analogue.

*unoffically* the Nova-T PCI freeview card works fine with MCE2005 with the latest drivers that are on the hauppauge site and also a few community sites.

If the graphics issue still appears after a driver upgrade then if you pop to www.thegreenbutton.com which is a resource and community site for MCE users there maybe someone thats able to assist you more with the shuttle :)

Hope this helps,

www.mediaatlantic.com features a range of OEM MCE compatible TV tuner cards

Used the latest official NVidia 71.84 MCE2005 drivers from here on a few GF4MX SFF PC's (Inc. Shuttles) when playing with MCE2005 and did not run into any problems with graphics. What versions of the NVidia drivers have you been using?

On the TV card front. If you DONT use the software on the CD and can receive FreeView then I cast another vote for getting the Nova-T DVB-T card and BDA drivers for MCE2005.

Appears you have to install a mpeg2 decoder. Nividia has a codec but it cost $20~ , or you can download it and try it out for 30days. If you google you can find free mpeg2 codec for decoding. For some odd reason MCE 2005 doesn't come with a mpeg2 decoder codec installed.

And I recommend not using 71.84 drivers with MCE 2005. Its buggy has hell. It will work for a few minutes when playing video then will freeze MCE or sound will be out of sync with video. I had to go back to 66.93 driver and it works flawlessly. A lot of people are having problems with 71.84 drivers with MCE. Just google it and you will see all the threads.

Thanks for your advice I have only installed the 6.6.9.3 drivers so I'll avoid updating them, however the 6.6.9.3 aren't perfect. Compared to the origional drivers supplied with the card there is a lot of screen flicker on loading windows and then loading MCE05.

I would have hoped an update might have resolved this, as screen flickering on load makes a really good system look buggy!

However i agree on 6.6.9.3 viedo plays great and that's all I really need! If you find some better drivers pls post back...