Windows 7 MCE – The Ongoing Saga 0
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.