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Wonky Gibbon Ramblings



Windows Media Centre MCE – UK EPG Runs Out 0

Posted on January 12, 2018 by danny

As of sometime late 2017, the EPG in the UK no longer seems to update in MCE. In all honesty, the need for MCE and indeed PVRs in general is on the wane given the existence of on-demand services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and catchup services like BBC iPlayer – not to mention Smart TVs and so on. Nevertheless – I’m not quite ready to kiss MCE goodbye – so I needed to keep it going just a little longer. Until I no longer need to play a Blueray – that sort of thing.

Googling – the solution seems to be to use a tool called EPG Collector. At the time of writing this can be downloaded from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/files/V4.3/

Installation and Config for Windows 7 MCE as follows:

  1. Download the EPG Collector xxx msi file – and install it.
  2. Download the latest EPG Fixpak from the same page, unzip it, and copy the files over the top of those installed by the msi.
  3. Run EPG Centre
  4. Go to File -> Create Collection parameters… select UK-SkyTV (Freesat does not seem to work).
    This will now open the configuration window.
    The first tab (Tuning) should have all the parameters set. No need to change anything here but check your country and area are set correctly
    Output tab. Select “EPG Collector imports the data to Window Media Centre”
    Tick the boxes for the two ‘create episode tags …’ options
    Advanced tab. Tick the Use freesat Huffman tables…
  5. Channels tab. Click on start scan. Loads of channels should appear. Lots of junk and duplicated. Click on ‘exclude all’ and then untick the excluded box for the channels actually desired (and that successfully tune). You can click on the column headers to sort the data. In the current version I couldn’t see any tickboxes for exclude, but by moving the cell cursor into the right excluded cell using the arrow keys and then pressing the space bar I was able to change the setting. Excluded rows are shown in red.
  6. Click on File->Save as, to save your setup to disk – save it with the default name EPG Collector.ini.
  7. Click on Run->Collect EPG Data

If you now open Windows Media Centre, you should find a guide full of data. Yay!

If all is well, it’s worth setting up the Windows Scheduler to automatically run EPG Collector for you every day or so. I f you used the default location for the EPG Collector.ini file then you don’t need any arguments either.

To do this:

  1. Open Windows Control Panel and navigate to Administrative Tools.
  2. Open Task Scheduler
  3. On the right hand side of the Task Scheduler window are a set of typical actions. Select “Create Basic Task”
  4. Work your way through the wizard that pops up
    1. Set the task to run when the computer starts
    2. Select the program to run as C:\Program Files (x86)\Geekzone\EPG Collector\EPGCollector.exe
      1. If you used the default config ini file name, you don’t need to provide any parameters.

And your done.

Particular thanks to this guy:

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=77177.0

Migrating Windows 7 on an ASUS N56VM Laptop to an SSD 1

Posted on October 13, 2013 by danny

That’s it! I can’t stand it any longer! My beautiful ASUS N56VM laptop – a mere year old, has slowed to the pace of an arthritic snail. Despite having 8GB of RAM and a 2.something GHz i7, it’s as wheezy as hell.

It’s time to move from spin disk to SSD, a 500GB Samsung 840 SD. Not least as I’d discovered that the existing disk was spinning at 5700rpm. I mean what is the point of selling a system with an i7 and 8GB of RAM and then equipping it with an ageing gerbil on a wheel to spin the disk. No wonder it had slowed to a heap of crap.

SO – how to copy the system from the existing spin disk to the SSD? Well first, I bought a disk big enough to take all my data. I can’t be doing with deleting stuff or moving onto external disk drives. Boring, boring, boring! I placed it temporarily into an external enclosure and used the free “EaseUS Partition Master” software to clone the disk from the internal spin disk to the external ssd.

There are two main advantages to cloning the existing spin disk. The first is that you don’t have to re-install all your software and setup all those little machine tweaks you like, second, if like this ASUS the windows installation software is all on a hidden recovery partition, it’s the only way to continue using the Windows 7 OEM licence that came with the machine.

So with the disk cloned – I took the ssd out of the external enclosure and swapped out the spin disk, turn on the machine and kapow lightening fast boot speeds, straight into windows – easy peasy.

Errr… No.

What I actually got was a boot failure and this error message screen:
– Status: 0xc0000225
– Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

Hmmm…

A bit of investigation revealed that the original disk and the clone were both using GPT rather that the older MBR partition table of yesteryear. GPT is a newer type of partition table that uses 64bit addresses rather than 32bit allowing for greater disk capacities and other good things. It forms part of the UEFI standard and indeed the ASUS uses UEFI for basic system configuration rather than the older BIOS system. UEFI was expecting an ID relating to the old spin disk and instead was getting one relating to the new SSD. So it stalled.

Pressing ESC when the ASUS symbol appears at boot brings up the boot selector, but even selecting the ssd there doesn’t help. A Windows Repair Disk is needed to fix the startup process. Type “Repair” in the start menu search area, will bring up “Create a System Repair Disk”. Unfortunately doing this on an OEM Windows 7 (as installed on the ASUS) creates a less useful repair disk that only allows you to re-install the operating system. You need a proper repair disk as would be created by a vanilla Windows 7 installation. Hope you’ve got one of those to hand!

With a vanilla Windows 7 Repair Disk in the DVD drive, reboot the machine and let it boot the DVD. Once booted, it will ask you to select a language and will then display a list of all the Windows 7 installations it has detected. There may well be none in the list as happened with me. Click “Next” in any case and let it attempt to repair the system. This will end up with a reboot.

Let it boot the repair disk again. It will probably find your Windows 7 installation this time. You will probably have to do this cycle of repair and reboot a few times.

Eventually – you will need to help it fix the boot record. Select the command prompt from the repair menu:
– work out which drive letter your DVD drive is mounted to (select each drive in turn, type DIR, repeat etc…) – let’s say it’s G: then type the following:

G:
cd boot
bootrec /fixboot

This command can be used to recrete a Windows 7 boot loader too:

bootsect /nt60 SYS all

This fixes the boot record.

Then run the repair system again, just kind of… because.

At the very least you will now be able to boot your system from the ESC boot menu – if you’re lucky it may even boot without ESC key intervention at all!

Thanks to the following sites and References:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=696523&page=4
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-gb
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/252790-error-0xc0000225-windows-boot.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20864-mbr-restore-windows-7-master-boot-record.html

NVIDIA Graphics Driver Installer Fails: The system cannot write to the specified device. 4

Posted on July 03, 2012 by danny

Just in case anyone runs into this problem and starts losing the plot!!

I was trying to install an earlier version of the NVIDIA display drivers for my graphics card today on Windows 7. Ones that MediaCentre would play nicely with.

Boy did I have to jump through some hoops!

Had to delete the version that Windows Update had downloaded otherwise it kept reinstalling them after the reboot – which was really annoying. Not trivial – you have to remove them from here:

C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvdsp something something something. To delete them, you first need to take ownership of them (google that) and then once you have ownership set the permissions to provide full control. THEN you can remove them.

Then when I ran the NVIDIA installer it failed whilst trying to install the graphics driver component. Grrrr!

Then I tried installing it from Device Manager using “Update Driver” – and got this error message: “The system cannot write to the specified device.” – which lead me to believe that it couldn’t write to the card, or something in the windows directory – probably due to more bloody file permissions or whatever. And then I realised … that it wasn’t NVIDIA’s fault at all. My “Temp” folder was on a partition that was practically full. The installer couldn’t unpack the files. I cleaned out the temp folder – and hey presto – the drivers updated very happily indeed.

Net result – my kids can now watch “Peppa Pig” when they get up in the morning and I can sleep in. Praise your deity du jour!

Flickery HD on Freeview 0

Posted on July 03, 2012 by danny

So I’ve been having problems with HD on FreeView for ages. Sometimes it would just about work but other times the screen would go black for up to 4 seconds at a time – though the audio would continue uninterrupted. Some channels seemed worse than others – but then a channel that had been okay one day – would turn to crap the next.

I have top end Black Gold tuners and a more than adequate graphics card – so I put it down to reception. It had the feel of a reception problem, comments on other forums seemed to corroborate that, and I noticed that MediaCenter reported the signal strength as being around 66%.

However – I had an SSD failure last week so I had to replace the drive – I usually move the pagefile to a spin disk – but this time I left it on the SSD.

HD works. No flickering.

I never considered it would page – I thought 2GB RAM would be enough. But clearly it is not and the system is using the pagefile.

If it really is paging video data, which as we know is lots of data, it could wear the SSD out fairly quickly, even with the levelling algorithms they use. I shall investigate the quantity of traffic and report back…

WMP12 and UPnP problems 0

Posted on May 11, 2011 by danny

So … I’m trying to use Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7 (32 bit) as a UPnP server. I enable all the things I’m supposed to enable. My Revo Mondo can “see” the server, it can even browse the files. But as soon as it tried to play them … nada!
So I try with my laptop. Same result. It can’t play the files.
Just to complete the loop, I try with my Android phone – again – it can list the files but not play them.

I try setting permissions on the files “everyone can read them” etc… no change.

In desperation I try using TVersity instead – but it appears to have the same problem. And additionally seems unable to cope with the size of the mp3 library.

A lot of browsing leads to lots of links on the Microsoft site that seem to have been removed. Only slightly annoying.

Finally – I work it out.

Like many people – my media collection has built up over many years. Either on an external drive, or on a secondary internal drive that gets pulled out of the old machine and plonked in the new one every time I upgrade my PC. Of course, when you do this (either with an external drive or with an internal one), the permissions on the files all relate to the old machine. So in effect, the new Windows 7 installation thinks that the drive is actually remote and refuses to serve the media.

If you copy the media (or a small subset of it) to the local drive and make it part of the music library – you suddenly find you can play it on your UPnP clients. Which is a solution if your system drive has the space. But if it doesn’t you’re still stuffed.

Eventually, I found the answer here http://forums.techarena.in/media-player/1168138.htm. God bless “Vincent”, whoever you are.

The solution is as follows:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE,
Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3. Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later
decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and
change the value to 0.

To repeat, even though this text is talking about RemoteContentSharing and technically your content is not remote (it’s either on an external drive attached to the machine, or an internal secondary drive) – Windows thinks it is because of the obsolete permissions on the files. Following the steps above, will make your world a better place, full of whatever sounds fill your mp3 collection.

Batch Convert WTV files to DVRMS and MPEG 25

Posted on August 19, 2010 by danny

When Microsoft released Windows 7 / the TV Service Pack for VISTA, they changed the file format from dvr-ms, as used in MCE 2005 to a new wtv format.

What does this new wtv format do for us that dvr-ms did not? Well that’s probably a subject for wikipedia, but for those of us watching Freeview in the UK – not a lot.

However what it does do, is stop us using other nice utilities such as DVRMSToolbox plus wtv files are half as big again as the dvr-ms files they replace. So a 3GB wtv file is equivalent to a 2GB dvr-ms file. Or to put it another way, that 1TB drive you bought so you could keep lots of shows, is now only worth 666GB. Which sucks.

So I want to convert my wtv files to dvr-ms files.

A very easy solution is simply to right click on the wtv file and select the option “Convert to .dvr-ms” format. However this has to be done one right click at a time (there’s no multi select) and rapidly becomes very tedious.

DVRMSToolbox with a bit of profile tweaking and using it’s FileWatcher feature can be made to do it automatically for you – but it is a bit fiddly to setup, and you have to have FileWatcher running continually.

However you can automate the whole process using DOS batch files. And if you want it to run periodically, use the Windows Scheduler service to kick it off, say, daily in the middle of the night.

So what would such a batch file look like? Well – this did take a couple of hours and a bit of research as my DOS batch scripting skills aren’t all that great – hence why I share it here.

ConvertAll.bat
@echo off

echo "Create wtv file list..."
dir /b *.wtv > d:\wtvlist.txt

echo "Process wtv file list..."
for /f "usebackq delims=" %%a IN (d:\wtvlist.txt) do call wtvrunner.bat "%%a"

echo "Cleaning Up"
del d:\wtvlist.txt

Drop the batch file into the directory you want to convert.

It works by creating a temporary file list in a txt file and looping through each entry in that file and passing it to a second batch file called “wtvrunner.bat”.

The wtvrunner.bat file then calls the standard windows utility for converting from wtv to dvr-ms (the same one used by the right click method above), converts the file and (if the output file was successfully created) deletes the wtv original. It’s a good idea to delete the wtv files as you go along rather than with a single del *.wtv at the end as it greatly limits the amount of free disk space required to convert a batch of files.

wtvrunner.bat
SET infile=%~1
SET outfile=%infile:~0,-4%
SET "outfile=%outfile% - DVRMS.dvr-ms"
echo %outfile%
c:\windows\ehome\WTVconverter.exe "%infile%"
IF EXIST "%outfile%" del "%infile%"

(NB: wtvconverter.exe is not available on Windows XP. Copying it onto an XP box doesn’t work either as it relies on other Windows 7 assemblies. So this is really Windows 7 only).

That works well then. Double Click the ConvertAll.bat file and a whole directory of wtv files gets converted to dvr-ms files.

However for other reasons, my workflow required me to then convert all the dvr-ms files to mpg files. So now I needed to add to the scripts to use DVRMSToolbox to do the conversion from dvrms to mpg.

So now ConvertAll.bat looks like this:

ConvertAll.bat
@echo off

echo "Create wtv file list..."
dir /b *.wtv > d:\wtvlist.txt

echo "Process wtv file list..."
for /f "usebackq delims=" %%a IN (d:\wtvlist.txt) do call wtvrunner.bat "%%a"

echo "Create dvr-ms file list..."
dir /b *.dvr-ms > d:\dvrmslist.txt

echo "Process dvr-ms file list..."
for /f "usebackq delims=" %%a IN (d:\dvrmslist.txt) do call dvrmsrunner.bat "%%a"

echo "Cleaning Up"
del d:\wtvlist.txt
del d:\dvrmslist.txt

This introduces a third batch file called “dvrmsrunner.bat” which handles the conversion of the dvr-ms files to mpg’s using DVRMSToolbox. This looks like this:

dvrmsrunner.bat
SET infile=%~1
SET outfile=%infile:.dvr-ms=.mpg%
"C:\Program Files (x86)\DVRMSToolbox\DVRMStoMPEG.exe" /if="%infile%" /of="%outfile%" /p=16384 /act="ffmpeg"
IF EXIST "%outfile%" del "%infile%"

Again this deletes the input files (if the output was successfully created) as soon as the conversion is finished to save space.

Job done.

NB: Scripts updated to only delete input files on success.

References:

Jim 2.5’s Blog – Article on DOS loops
John John’s post from this thread on looping through lists of filenames that have spaces in.
This article on dos string manipulation for replacing .dvr-ms extension with .mpg
macdad’s post from this thread on stripping off three character file extensions from file names.

Not all TV Cards are Created Equal 2

Posted on December 30, 2009 by danny

Question

So, what is the difference between one TV card and another; given you can buy dual tuner cards that will allow you to record two channels of DVB-T for next to nothing – what do the more expensive cards give you?

This has been bothering me since my last post on my Windows 7 MCE. Indeed its been bothering me ever since I did my original tests with Windows 7 RC1. That build seemed rather better in terms of responsiveness than the actual Windows 7 one did. There are of course lots of differences between the systems. One was RC Ultimate edition, the other the released Home premium, different disk drives as well – but one thing I had overlooked was the TV Tuner Card. Due to a problem with the Black Gold Signature cards (you can’t use two together under Windows 7 as you could in XP), when I built the final system I replaced the single Black Gold card I had used in the RC with a new Dual Tuner card from Peak.

In terms of the recorded programs, the Peak card has produced excellent results – but in this very underpowered, single core setup it has struggled to encode data when the machine was doing other things such as fast forwarding a different program being watched simultaneously.

Putting the single Black Gold tuner back in to the system, revolutionised it. It’s as quick as Windows MCE 2005 ever was.

Answer

And that’s the difference, the more expensive cards do much more of the encoding effort, relieving the burden from the CPU. Freeing it up to be responsive to user requests (such as “Fast Forward my program please” or “can I see the Guide whilst my program still plays please”) without crashing.

Conclusion

Which brings you to a simple choice:
It’s relatively easy to build a great PVR around an old motherboard, CPU and Windows 7, if you add high end TV tuners (encoders) and an average Graphics card (decoder) because all the heavy duty processing isn’t being done by the old hardware. It’s beeing done by dedicated high end video encoders in the TV tuner, or in the dedicated MPEG2 decoding pipeline of the Graphics card. Which rather bursts the balloon on the sense of acheivement to be honest. But for a machine which lives under the TV which is only used as a telly, does make a lot of sense.

But if you want a more versatile all round machine for which watching TV is only one of it’s role, then you just have to get something with a lot more CPU muscle, preferably with multiple cores so that it’s responsive. You then don’t need high end encoders and cheaper cards such as the Peak, will more thasn do the job. Stability might still be an issue though – as an asside, I notice that the machine is much less prone to crashing now. Fast Forward (when recording something else), was a bit risky previously. Makes sense really. Dedicated hardware encoders and decoders always do just that – encode/decode video. A CPU by contrast can be nagged by any one of a zillion different systems to interrupt what it’s doing and just quickly do something else. Which is all fine until it hits something that is time, or timing critical. Bang.

It still hasn’t cost that much. A new Black Gold Dual Tuner card is £80 which even when added to the cost of the new graphics – is under £100. Which is cheaper than buying a new motherboard, RAM, CPU – and you’d still have to buy the graphics card anyway. But it’s not the saving you’d hope for – particularly when you consider that you can buy good dedicated dual tuner PVR’s for less than double the price of the Black Gold card.

Squeezing more Performance out of Windows 7 Media Center 0

Posted on December 12, 2009 by danny

So then, the wife isn’t that happy with Windows 7 Media Center. It deosn’t always respond to her remote control commands (usually when its recording something else) which is annoying.

So here at Gibbon Towers, it was time to do some work to see what was going on in terms of system resources. Hmmm – first thing was that there wan’t much free RAM left on the machine. Never a good sign. So time to turn off whatever I could to free up some RAM and some CPU clock cycles.

Switching off Features

Started off by switching off a bunch of Windows Features. In Windows 7 there’s a proper app to do this, not just an uninstaller. Just type “Windows Features” into the start menu. Rather cleverly, it properly unloads and disables them so that they use no system resources whatsoever rather than uninstall them altogether. Which means that when you want to re-enable them at so,me later date – you haven’t got the arse of trying to find the DVD. Result!

Switching off Services

I then set about switching off all the Windows 7 Services not required for watching or using the Media Center application (NB: we don’t use Media Extenders either) in Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. Thus I disabled the following services:

  • Background Intelligent Transfer Service
  • Desktop Window Manager Session Manager
  • Distributed Link Tracking Client
  • HomeGroup Listener
  • HomeGroup Provider
  • IP Helper
  • Peer Name Resolution Protocol
  • Peer Networking Grouping
  • Peer Networking Identity Manager
  • PNRP Machine Name Publication Service
  • Print Spooler
  • Themes
  • Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service

For more information on what services do what, in Windows 7 (and how safe it is to disable them) – the Black Viper website is superb.

Given that we’re not going to have Extenders in other rooms, not going to use the new HomeGroup functionality (you still have networking without HomeGroup), I switched off Aero and all the Theme stuff (Media Center doesn’t use them) – and I’m not going to do any printing. All of which makes sense because the machine really does just live under the telly, playing video, in our house.

Doing all of this had an immediate and dramatic impact on responsiveness. In fact the remote control is back to MCE 2005 levels of useability which is excellent. And looking at the system resources there’s much more free RAM in the system (it released hundreds of MB).

Other Changes

I then did a comparison of CPU’usage of NVidia’s PureVideo decoder against Microsoft’s decoder by having them in turn play back the same video file. According to task manager, PureVideo was about 10% more intensive on the CPU;. Since I can see no difference in quality – I’ll go with Microsoft then.

XVID had become a car crash again. Turned out that Windows had managed to undo the hack I applied form the previous host to get it working. Reapplying the hack not only fixed XVID but also improved responsiveness, particularly when recording another program at the same time.

I also upgraded the CPU from an Athlon XP 1600+ to a 2100+, because err… I could. And it only cost £5. And it made absolutely no difference whatsoever.

Setting up Power Saving Modes

Finally the guy at Slick Solutions has produced a new version of his MCE Standby Tool for Windows 7 – which I can’t recommend enough. Get that from a link somewhere in this post http://www.degroeneknop.nl/forum/index.php/topic,4989.75.htmlhttp://www.degroeneknop.nl/forum/index.php/topic,4989.75.html Really sorts out the power management. If you think it’s good, make a donatation to him.

Conclusion

So after spending a few quid (most notably on both a TV card and a Graphics card) – the whole system does now work. It works well when playing back, or recording one or two channels together. It still struggles when doing all three together particularly when using the remote to fast forward or rewind).

For reference the two biggest improvements were turning off the unwanted bits of Windows, and applying the codec patch from the GreenButton website.

When I find some time I want to do a comparison of CPU usage on the Black Gold card vs the PEAK one. I have a feeling that the Black Gold one takes on more of the work of encoding whilst the PEAK one leaves more to the CPU. But that’s just a guess at the moment.

A Random Gotcha

NB: One other problem that fooled me a bit was that the disk became full. Until I freed up some space that murdered performance as well.

Windows 7 MCE – The Ongoing Saga 0

Posted on November 13, 2009 by danny

Well as mentioned in the earlier post, as soon as Windows 7 was released, I rushed out and bought a copy and installed it on the Media Centre.

There have been quite a few problems. Some known – some unknown.

TV Cards

I already knew I was going to have to replace the TV cards as the Black Gold ones couldn’t be used as a pair under either Vista or Windows 7 due to a design flaw either in the cards or the revised driver model used from Vista onwards. So I bought a new PCI Dual Tuner DVB-T card from Peak (that takes just the one slot). And that resolved that. The new card is much slower to tune than the Black Gold, but once configured, is much more responsive to changing channel during viewing. Its been very reliable ever since and the quality of recording is identical (ie: excellent).

Graphics Card

The next problem was the Graphics card. Again as previously mentioned, the drivers for the GeForce 5200 FX from Nvidia are a bare minimum. Many of the controls that were available under Windows XP were not present under Windows 7 (& Vista). Worse, even though I set 720×576, the display was still a bit smaller than the TV display with some strange curved geometry, and there was no way of growing the display size as there had been under XP. Some of the graphics and video playback was also a bit jittery. I was pretty sure that any graphics acceleration capability on the card was also inaccessible and usused. A search on the NVidia website showed that they’d just released Windows & drivers for all cards from the GeForce 6 series and up. Reading between the lines then, there’s no chance of anything for the 5200. It really is outrageous that in 2009 this card is still sold new and yet you can’t get full drivers for either Vista or Windows 7 – just crippled ones. Thus, the only solution was to upgrade – which as the motherboard has an AGP slot was going to be a challenge. However – I mamanaged to find a new GeForce 6200 with an AGP interface and 256MB of RAM for about 30 quid, so bought that. This resolves the problem, particularly once MCE starts and expands the screen slightly (resolving the Geometry problem).

Two other problems I hit in the Graphics card area.

First the NVidia PureVideo totally crashed the machine with the original GeForce FX 5200 (weird as it worked with Win 7 RC1). So I had to go with the Microsoft ones which seem to work a bit better than in Win7 RC1. Retesting the PureVideo with the new 6200 card – the good news was that it no longer crashes. The bad news is that (subjectively), it’s no better or more responsive than the Microsoft ones. On that basis I went with Microsoft.

The second, was an accidental Black Screen in MCE. I caused this by twiddling with the AGP aperture size. I reduced it to 16MB thinking that with 256MB onboard it wouldn’t need much extra RAM from the system. Wrong! MCE became a black screen. I could hear the sounds of it loading along with occasional swishes of colour but then, just an unhappy black screen. Setting the Aperture Size back to 256MB resolved the problem.

Networking

Elsewhere, I ran into problems with the Realtek network card which was causing a boot lockup (if the network cable was plugged in). The card doesn’t seat quite perfectly in the PCI slot (the bracket is slightly too long at the bottom). Forcing the network speed down to 100Mbps rather than allowing it to negotiate 1Gbps seems to resolve it. But I can’t help feeling that filing down the bracket would solve the problem properly. That or a more expensive card. And it’s annoying because you really want 1Gbps bandwidth in a Mediacenter if you’re going to use the video data elsewhere.

XVID

The slow XVID playback problem was resolved using help from The Green Button website in this article. Whoever worked that out – is a genius!!

This inadvertantly solved much of another problem I was having with responsiveness. No idea why. Whenever I was watching a program and went to view the guide (say) using the remote, the guide would display and then the system would lock up. The program would continue to play in the background – but the system would become totally unresponsive for minutes at a time. The DivX hack in the article helped this problem hugely (though it’s still a bit slow).

And hey presto – one working Windows 7 mediacenter, running on kit that’s mostly about 7 years old.

As I said before, it isn’t ever going to work well with HD content – but it works just fine for standard TV content.

Can old Hardware run Windows 7 Media Center? 1

Posted on September 25, 2009 by danny

When the RC of Windows 7 came out – I was minded to investigate whether the same hardware I built to run MCE 2005 (ie: XP) could run Windows 7 Media Center (particularly as time goes by my MCE2005 system gets less and less stable) ? I never bothered to upgrade to Vista because it was clear that Vista was too processor hungry but with Windows 7 making waves for being as quick if not quicker than XP, I wanted to investigate.

The post for the original MCE2005 build is here

The original spec was:

  • Soltek 75DRV2 Motherboard (circa 2002)
  • AMD Athlon XP 1600+
  • 1.0 GB Ram (can run on 512MB – but gets sluggish once you have many recordings to index)
  • NVidia GeForce FX5200 Video card (fanless) with TV output
  • A Seagate Barracuda 7200 320GB hard drive
  • Twin Black Gold Signature TV cards to encode DVB-T (Freeview) signals
  • Gigabit LAN card

Well, in summary – yes it can – but there were a number of problems, mostly revolving around drivers.

After installing Windows 7 on a spare 80GB drive, audio and networking worked immediately. Also it can playback XVID natively so no XVID instal required. Nor does it require a third party mpeg decoder in the way that MCE2005 did. It has one built in, out of the box.

NVidia Graphics Card

The graphics card is old (though you can still buy it even new in 2009) – an NVidia GeForce FX 5200. The only drivers currently available were released back in 2006 (for Vista) and they do just about work. Worryingly NVidia have only so far released proper Windows 7 drivers for their more recent cards. I hope they expand support for older cards in due course but it doesn’t look promising.

Configuring the card was tricky, a lot of the NVidia Control Panel that had been available in XP was gone. I believe the Windows 7 driver model (inherited from Vista) has changed meaning those features would have to be reimplemented – if indeed it is even possibel to do so. Luckilly – I was able to select the correct resolution of 768 x 576 (PAL) once I had set “TV0” to be the main card output. The refresh rates available are way low (29Hz or something) – but I haven’t found away yet to tell Windows 7, that the display is a TV (a non plug-n-play device) and that it should be using 50Hz. That said it doesn’t seem to flicker – so it’s a low priority to fix.

Black Gold Digital Tuners

The Black Gold situation is annoying (and is well documented on “The Green Button” website here). Black Gold seem unable or unwilling to update the drivers such that two of these cards can work side by side in the same box. You can only use one. So one has to come out. Which means I shall have to buy another single or dual tuner card (from another manufacturer I think too). Not the best customer servicer.

Anyway, taking out one of the Black Gold cards got the other to work.

Performance

Initially, performance was pretty shabby. So I turned off a lot of unnecessary Windows 7 stuff to get some speed back. This page has some good information on this. More detail on the services can be found from Black Viper.

In essence I turned off a lot of services and switched off Aero (which although many people say this makes little difference – it’s a shite graphics card! – and Media Center doesn’t use Aero anyway).

In the process, I accidentally turned off the Human Interface Service which killed much of the Remote Control. So undid that. Also – it does need the Windows Search service.

Having done that – performance was much better and the media center UI is perfectly responsive.

Things get a bit more sticky once you start watching live telly – it does take a bit longer than MCE 2005 to get itself initialised and going – and is prone to the odd starting playback stutter – but once running it’s solid.

Similarly playing back pre-recorded video whilst recording another channel seems to work well without glitch in the recorded stream. Again playback startup is a bit slow.

Because of the problems with the Black Gold drivers – I was unable to test recording two streams simiultaneously whilst playing back a third.

The only significant lockup was when using the back button on live tv, it took me back to the guide (which is fine) but then got stuck taking me back to the main menu. Odd. Pressing the green button seems to fix this most of the time.

The one signifcant difference in hardware between the XP and Windows 7 setup’s was the Hard Drive – because I’m using my fast 320GB drive for my live MCE 2005 system, I had to use a slower 80GB Western Digital drive for the Windows 7 test.
This may well be significant and explain some of the stutters – I can’t prove that at the moment though. Certainly the faster drive can only improve things.
The Seagate manages 63.05 MB/s and has a 16MB cache whilst the Western Digital only manages 43.47 MB/s and has an 8MB cache.

Migration of Existing Recordings

Although Windows 7 MCE uses a new storage format for recorded TV, it seems to playback dvrms files transfered across from MCE 2005 just fine.

But then, there is XVID.

Oh dear. XVID.

I encode a lot of stuff to XVID. Movie’s and home Camcorder stuff. Playing any of this, even from the local hard drive was grindingly slow. Playback was quaerter speed, audio normal speed and the UI is completely unresponsive. Installing XVID in the hope that it would take over from Microsoft’s codec’s didn’t help either. Some other config required here perhaps. But I haven’t yet googled a way how (and I ain’t smart enough to work it out for myself!)

Again, looking at the Green Button website – this seems to be a common problem. Here’s hoping it gets sorted by the October release. Certainly decoding XVID’s usually doesn’t require much processing power at all – so it seems odd.

Then there is the aspect ratio of the XVID’s on screen – which displayed just fine in MCE 2005, but are completely wrong in Windows 7 being stretched height wise. Ugh.

Some further research shows that the XVID’s play fine in Media Player. Weird.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that at the moment the system does perform better where TV is concerned when running MCE 2005 – but the performance in Windows 7 is certainly not unuseable by a long shot.

And there’s a lot to like in the new UI with all the downloading of artwork for movies etc… plus the general reorganisation of the UI. It all seems to work well, logically and is responsive. Support for features such as fasr forward/revwind in XVID’s and other Video file types is much improved. And the extra digital buttons we get in the UK (“press the red button now for etc”) actually seem to work which they never did in MCE XP.

It would also have to be said that my MCE2005 install is no longer that stable and is likely to crash if left by itself for a week. It remains to be seen how stable Windows 7 MCE is by comparison.

So in short – when Windows 7 comes out for real – I’m definately going to try to move over to it with this hardware.

Even if XVID playback is screwed – someone will work out a fix for that!

Mind you, you’re never going to be watching HD on this system! 🙂



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