How I wish that were true.  The Customizer only allows you to change the Replay part of rewind - from the default 7 seconds to whatever you want.  It doesn't allow you to change the actual length of the buffer.  Correct me if I'm wrong.  You'd make me a happy guy, but I've played with this.

Steve,

I too am having some issues with my live tv. I would be happy to look as well, but I am not really familiar with the registry. Last time I altered it I had really messed something up and had to reinstall mce2005 what a headache. So if you could tell me step by step, I would love to help.

Thank
Kcam1999

No, you can't.  You can change how FAST you can rewind, but not how MUCH you can rewind.  Believe me, this is not possible right now.  I've actually sent an email to the guy who wrote MCE Customizer, asking him to possible add this feature.  He's looking into it.  Changing the registry settings doesn't work because they get reinitialized somehow every time you fire up MCE.  Big bummer.

The other thing we'd really like is a WARNING when changing channels if you're rewound at all.  The problem is you can accidentally hit the wrong button and change the channel when you didn't mean to - like when you hit the OK button instead of PLAY and it filps you to the last channel you were on.  Poof; there goes your rewound program and you can't get back to it.

Boy, I've done that a few times and been royally ****ED.  That would be a nice adjustment to implement that warning.

I am having a similar issue with MCE 2005 - it seems when the image is still, the picture is perfect, but when there is movement a very slight blur occurs - its almost nonexistant but it is there all the same.

I'll try out this reg hack and report back.

My System:

MCE2005, Athlon XP2800, 1Gb DDR333, 200Gb, Radeon 9800, CLUB3D 1000, 54g Wi-fi card, CAV-T02 Case, Pioneer DVR-109 Silver, Aerogate 1.

 

 

 

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Antec Fusion V2
C2D 2.13 o/c to 3.2
2GB
160GB os / 750GB Recorded TV
8800GT
NOVA T-500
Ultimate 32-Bit
3.3TB NAS (SD+HD Material)

Steve (and others),

My mediacenter works fine! Except when I compare the TV quality with a
normal TV tuner the mediacenter lacks bigtime. I believe that's your problem too?
I had the opertunity to use my mediacenter on a brand new JVC LCD TV (26"
low res) and the live tv and recoded TV looks so much worse I don't believe
anyone will buy this when displayed next to eachother.
When I look at CNN for example it looks like the ticker runs half the amound
of images.
When you look at the ticker on a single mediacenter it looks quite ok, not
perfect but it's readable.
But when another TV is installed next to it on the same channel it looks
like **** on the mediacenter.
The system I use is a P4 2.8GHz with a nvidia 6600 graphics adapter and a
hauppauge PVR 150 mce.
The decoder from cyberlink (powerdvd 6) so that can't be the problem.
When I read in mediacenter's specs that it sould also be able to handle HDTV
I expect that it should have no problems with standard analog cable TV.
Now I saw a lot of possible solutions/tweaks/etc ont this topic but shouldn't media center work just fine right out of the box?
Using Dscaler the tv-image is just fine, so the tuner card is ok.

Does anyone share my experience and found a solution?

Thx, Leon

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Asus P5GD1 PRO
Intel P4 HT 2.8GHz
512MB DDR
Samsung 160GB S-ATA
Benq DW 1620
Asus N6600 256MB
Hauppauge MCE 150

DIGN HV-5

I know i reviving an old topic but i have a question. On my media center, when something moves horizontally (and possibly vertically, i havent noticed) across the screen, the items appears to blur. This is especially evident with text (i.e. a news crawl). Is this just me or is this a common problem? Is there a fix or something i can do?


Thanx!

for those complaining about PQ a couple of things to try....

If using PowerDVD try using the free trial of NVDVD and make sure HW accel is enabled.

 

If using an LCD TV try another TV, some people see ghosting and many times it is not the PC but the TV. Some LCD TV sets have high responce times which can cause the ghosting. Obviously if you have compared the direct cable input to the same LCD TV and it looked better then there could be two things happening, one your internal scaler on the TV is doing a better job, or two your not running at the Native resolution of your LCD TV.... which would also effect your desktop and other items. One way to tets the responce time of your monitor is to play a game on your PC with some fast action and see if there is some blurring there.

Finally how are you connecting to the LCD TV.... if you are not connecting via VGA, or DVI, or High def component, and you are via s-video or composite I think everyone on the board should smack you

 

I had poor quality with live tv in the beginning. I moved my MCE PC closer to my TIVO box and connected it to my tuner card with a Monster Coax cable.

My video quality is better than my Sony Trinitron, no doubt partly because its a 17" screen at higher resolution [my tv is 1024x768].

I changed the number from 20 million to forty million, but seeing no difference, changed it back.

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We are immortal beings
On a journey through eternity
The possibilities are infinite

~= Experience the magic =~

I changed to 60000000 and didnt really notice a difference. I will keep checking and see if I can't find some way of determining if it really does make a difference..

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Hewlett Packard Pavilion zd7015us

i tried changing the registry and i noticed my sharpness and quality for live tv was much better. i actually turned down the sharpness beacause it looked so much better. thanks for the tip. i have a toshiba flatscreen tv and now mce quality matches the direct input

So sorry for bringing up old topics, but did anyone ever find a definitive way to increase the bitrate the hauppauge cards are using?

I can't use Wintv2k with my 500mce (or atleast I don't think I can since there's no non-mce drivers for the 500mce).

Has anyone had any luck with this?

I've been messing around with MCE and iv managed to get digital quality for Live TV and Recordings. Now because not everyone has the same system specs, these settings may not work for everyone. I'm currently using a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150MCE and i highly recommend this capture card. I've used an all-in-wonder card in the past which uses software encoding and it doesn't even come close to the video quality of a hardware encoding capture card.

First off, before you make any changes to your system, do yourself a favor and make a backup. I use Acronis True Image, and it has never let me down. Using windows System Restore just doesn't cut it.

If you aren't using InterVideo as your DVD Decoder, go get it now. It comes with WinDVD and i highly recommend you get the Platinum version. Then make sure you’re using it as you default video decoder using Microsoft’s "Video Decoder Checkup Utility". Also another tip, if your updating your video decoder i recommend you uninstall any previous versions and run a registry cleaner before installing the latest version.

With regards to motion blurring and choppiness. To fix this problem i enabled DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) and Hardware Motion Compensation (HWMC) through the registry. These settings seem to be apart of the video decoder, and i've read that not all video cards support these settings.

Here are my registry settings:
note* you'll have to restart your computer before any registry changes take effect.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo\Common\VideoDec]
"DsContinuousRate"=dword:00000001
"DXVA"=dword:00000001
"HWMC"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\InterVideo\Common\VideoDec]
"DsContinuousRate"=dword:00000001
"DXVA"=dword:00000001
"HWMC"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\InterVideo\MCE\VideoDec]
"DsContinuousRate"=dword:00000001
"Dxva"=dword:00000001

Try these settings, they should make a difference. Aslo make sure "DsContinuousRate" is set to 1 or the video will stick when ff and rw'ing. The settings above seem to work just fine.

Here's my EncodingQuality settings:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording]
"EncodingQuality"  3000000, 4500000, 6000000, 8500000

Here are some other Hauppauge WinTV settings that make a nice difference. The first thing you want to do is add the below "HcwSaveEncoderSettings" to your registry. This will allow the below settings to save after you restart your computer. After you add this to your registry restart your computer before making any further changes.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData]
"HcwSaveEncoderSettings"=dword:00000001

Now that your settings will save you can use GraphEdit to make some changes. Using GraphEdit, go to: Graph > Insert Filters > Multiplexer Devices > Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Encoder and Insert Filter. Then right click on the filter and select properties. Under the "Hauppauge ECP Video" tab change the Bitrate Average to "6000", the Peak to "12000" and P Spacing to "1". Then under the "Dynamic Noise Reduction" tab i changed the "Temporal Static Level" to 0. Try changing this to something between 0 and 3, so see what looks best for your system.

You can also adjust the sharpness of you Hauppauge WinTV card, although i find the default setting is fine. With the current drivers the default settings is 4.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData]
"HcwSharpness"= "4"  note* the default setting may be different.

Okay one more setting, search through your registry for "DefAvgBitRate". Increasing the Decimal value for this registry setting seems to make a big difference in picture quality. The default settings is something like "20000000", try settings this value to "85000000" or even higher. I've actually set this value to as high as "850000000" count the zeros, and the picture quality got significantly better. I suggest trying to find the highest value your computer will handle without any problems.

I hope this helps some of you out there.  I can now watch Live TV and Recordings on a 57" HDTV without any noticeable loss of quality. Here's a screenshot.

 

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xpMCE 2005
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE
InterVideo DVD Decoder

Good to know, thanks.

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We are immortal beings
On a journey through eternity
The possibilities are infinite

~= Experience the magic =~