DFox:

Cafe.Racer:

I've seen this one quite a few times, but can't reliably repeat it - sometimes when using the CH+ and CH- buttons to navigate up/down the guide, the guide stops scrolling, but the actual channel preview behind the guide changes channel.

I've had this similar one too. During playback I will bring up the guide and hit the skip button to move forward 12 hours, and then the actual playback will start skipping forward. I don't know how to consistently reproduce it.

I noticed last night that it also does it on Skip forward and back.  If I hit Skip, Skip, Skip, Skip forward while in the guide the "selector" (the thing that highlights the program in the guide) would not appear, and the program in the background starts to skip forwards.

It happens anywhere between 4 and 7 "Skips", it seems the quicker you press them, the more likely you are to get it.  Once the selector is "off" the guide, if you press up or down you can get it to reappear and it works again, but does seem to drop out again more frequently.

It's as though the selector is falling through a hole in the guide, and making the preview "active".

Since the install of TV pack I had all thumbnails for my Recorded TV. DVR-MS and WTV but today all off a sudden all thumbnails are gone and didn't come back.

Also new recorded shows don't show thumbnails.

Is there a resolution to get them back yet?

 

jrbown:

Yes! Although I'm not using an extender.

I also installed TV Pack over an existing setup. Although it was a clean setup - a dedicated HTPC  which had a clean install of Vista, and Media Center about 6 months ago, and nothing else other that Windows updates.

I've noticed a slightly higher general CPU usage (and disk access) level, but more problematic is that there are periods where this exceptionally high (100% CPU) which happen maybe once or twice a day, and last a few minutes. These brief periods seriously affect live TV playback (resulting in blocking / pixellation), and general usability such as incredibly slow display of thumbnails etc. Once Media Center finishes whatever it's doing and usage goes back down, everything is fine again.

It's not the World's fastest CPU (AMD Sempron LE1250), but then in an HTPC you need a low wattage, cool processor (I can't have a quad core with 100Mega-dB fan on it...). And it never had any trouble at all keeping up until I installed TV Pack.

Is there a new minimum spec required for TV Pack? Or is there some problem or other?...

The fact that it only happens in brief periods makes me think it's some background process that only runs occasionally, like the Microsoft indexing service which is now used to index the guide. Maybe the service is interpreting watching live TV as a period of low activity, and then kicks in at full speed or something.

Does someone from Microsoft periodically monitor this thread by the way? There's a whole load of problems which are all experienced by a whole load of users with different setups.

JB

Thanks.
We had a new wrinkle yesterday... my wife could navigate the Guide via the extender and then any time she selected a show the screen would go blue. Not a Blue Screen in the classic Windows sense, rather blue like the blue behind the Guide. I restarted the extender service on the server and that seemed to fix it but that  is a lame solution.

Seriously thinking about what to do this weekend: Complete fresh install of Vista + TV Pack or just go back to old school VMC. I really like the integration of Clear QAM that TV Pack gives me. I have the HD Homerun so I can still make it work but I like the native version. Also I can add more tuners easily with TV Pack. Yet, the CPU fan cranking up and causing glitches in the viewing is a problem. Sometimes whating 'live' tv is a problem and if I pause for just a few seconds (or hit skip back) I get a much better experience.

Yeah, I knew what I was getting into with TV Pack. So, it is a matter of whether these things will be fixed near term or if I should take a step back and watch from the sidelines for now.

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Home Built Media Server | Vista Ultimate (x86) | HP MediaSmart Connect Extender | www.techlifeweb.com

I have a lot of the problems mentioned already, and a couple extra that might be worthy of noting.

The first problem I see that occurred after TV Pack, both as an upgrade and a fresh install is with the UI.  I can't pin down the exact cause, but more often than not the UI becomes 'jumpy' or slow on me, even when there is no media playing.  It's not unresponsive, it's more that the graphics do not flow like they should.  I can solve this easily by restoring/maximizing Media Center.  The interesting thing here is that when the UI is hosed, my first attempt to restore the window ALWAYS fails -- the button clicks, but nothing happens.  The second click to restore works, and the UI flows smoothly and normally again.  This did not happen prior to TV pack.

The second, and far more annoying problem I have is an occasional frame drop/stutter with both Live (HD) TV and Recorded (HD) TV.  It seems to happen once every couple minutes with HD content.  It's not bad, per se, but it's definately there.  I compared with a non-TV pack VMC and the frame drop definatelty does not occur.  I have low CPU load, lots of free physical RAM, etc, the system is far from being taxed, I cannot pin down why this is happening, but it's probably safe to rule out the video drivers/PC for a change since it also happens with Recorded TV.  There is no problem with SDTV at all, it's always happening with HD content.

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Vista SP1 x64 TV Pack / Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H / AMD Phenom 9350e / 2GB / Western Digital WD5000AACS / Sony BDU-X10S / (2) SiliconDust HDHomeRuns - 1 Baltimore OTA, 1 Washington OTA / TotalMedia Theater / myNetflix / emuCenter / 1080i Philips 30PW9100D

As a bit of time has passed now I have a few things to report. A couple of them duplicate others above to confirm that I also have the same issues. First is the stutter when watching hd content (both live and recorded), again like the post above the CPU isn't the latest and greatest however it should be adequate (Core 2 Duo) yet it still occasionally stutters. Note that this stutter did not occur previously with Clear QAM HD using either GBPVR or the Hauppauge/Avermedia clear qam programs. They all 3 have their issues as well though making it undesireable to use them. (Poor audio sync with GBPVR and the Hauppauge/AverMedia programs are worthless for scheduling anything to record) Second is the annoying channel banner popping up while watching recorded tv. I'm not sure if it's related to other programs recording at the same time or not but it could be possible. (Not sure if I've always had another recording starting while watching recorded tv or not). The last one I didn't see above. Quite often when I have a program recording (and sometimes even if there isn't) then the tv (both recorded and live) fails to display with a message about incorrectly configured, please restart media center or somehting along those lines. With recorded tv I can usually hit the stop button and then restart it and after a few times doing this then it will start playing. With live TV I usually need to channel up and down a couple of times and then it starts.

Oh, there was one other issue. For some reason the guide stopped updating and wouldn't display program data. Initially it was just the analog channels but then the HD ones stopped as well a few days later. When this occurred I had to set up the tuners over again so it would rebuild the guide data. Unfortunately I was unable to find a way to simply change the guide data without running through the entire setup and lengthy Clear QAM channel scan. I don't mind an initial channel scan that is lengthy but having to repear it if the guide data gets corrupted seems a bit ludicrous. Either make it so the guide will not get corrupted or give us a way to reload the guide without a new scan.

gracias

 

Living near a border where you have the privilege to be able to watch several countries DVB-T-transmissions does not seem to be a situation Microsoft development team has taken into account.
I live in Sweden and watch Swedish and Danish TV-transmissions on daily basis. For me is the TV Pack a great step forward, as I finally get the captions on Danish TV. Thank you Microsoft.
But, with the pack came also a new way of editing and rearranging channels, wich doesnt work very well in this environment!
When scanning for available TV-channels I get some 50 available channels. After TV Pack installation is unfortunately all channels, including encrypyted channels, checked as available. No big deal, but a pain none the less.
Worse is that the channels are sorted in some kind o favourite order, which means I get double entries for the first 10-11 positions.
On program 1 i get Danish TV1 and Swedish TV1, and so forth...
As two channels occupy the same space its not possible to move tx Danish TV1 to position 8, without also moving Swedish TV1.
Please remove or disregard this favourite listing, during the channel scan. Let the user place the channels at his own discretion. 

Can you not just "split" the channel, Roger?

Nope. Move one and both is moved.

Split is different to move, though.

If you edit a chaneel, then select "Sources" over to the right and "Split" the channels out.

So before I bite the bullet and reinstall everything I thought I'd try a few things. These were just done the other night so further testing and watching are needed but I thought I'd post this in case others are having issues and want to try it.
1. Disabled Superfetch. I don't think this is needed on a media center only server. Just my opinion. One thing I hate is that articles linked to about Superfetch were written 2 years ago based on pre-release Vista and we all know how far it has come since SP1.
2. Uninstalled my antivirus program (AVG). Some would say risky but I'm going to go with it. This is a server that sits behind a firewall and downloads are done on other machines with antivirus programs on them so that is at least safer.
3. I scaled way back on indexing. It is good to have some directories indexed like %windir%\ehome (per this http://is.gd/3u6N) so I just select certain directories for indexing which helps minimize thrashing and overhead.
4. Changed my processor performance settings to Background Services instead of Programs.

So far, I have notice things seem to have quieted down. The CPU still gets cranked up with merely  the extender connecting to the server. I'd say it runs at about 25% constantly even with the above tweaks.

Still may go for a fresh install. We'll see.

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Home Built Media Server | Vista Ultimate (x86) | HP MediaSmart Connect Extender | www.techlifeweb.com

Kingtone:

1. Disabled Superfetch. I don't think this is needed on a media center only server. Just my opinion. One thing I hate is that articles linked to about Superfetch were written 2 years ago based on pre-release Vista and we all know how far it has come since SP1.

I think a lot of people get overly worked up about Superfetch myself, but having it on/off for a dedicated Media Center PC isn't likely to make much of a difference, except at boot time.  Personally, I opted to turn it back on and throw a 4GB ReadyBoost USB stick in the back.  No thrashing at all anymore, it seems to favor the ReadyBoost.  I would also like to find better and more modern information about these services and how they may have changed post-SP1.  They really don't seem to be as broken as they once were.  It doesn't appear to be trying to load my entire MP3 collection into memory anymore, at least :) 

But .. I see no real difference on anything with it on, either.  I wasn't actually expecting to, I'm just trying to cut down on the number of 'customizations' I had to make to the system, you never know when MS will toss in some feature that requires a service you disabled before it operates properly.

Kingtone:

4. Changed my processor performance settings to Background Services instead of Programs.

I'm not sure this was a good idea to improve the performance of Media Center, per se, but I would love to know your results.  Do you actually see any performance gains on the extenders with this set?

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Vista SP1 x64 TV Pack / Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H / AMD Phenom 9350e / 2GB / Western Digital WD5000AACS / Sony BDU-X10S / (2) SiliconDust HDHomeRuns - 1 Baltimore OTA, 1 Washington OTA / TotalMedia Theater / myNetflix / emuCenter / 1080i Philips 30PW9100D

djp952:

Kingtone:

1. Disabled Superfetch. I don't think this is needed on a media center only server. Just my opinion. One thing I hate is that articles linked to about Superfetch were written 2 years ago based on pre-release Vista and we all know how far it has come since SP1.

I think a lot of people get overly worked up about Superfetch myself, but having it on/off for a dedicated Media Center PC isn't likely to make much of a difference, except at boot time.  Personally, I opted to turn it back on and throw a 4GB ReadyBoost USB stick in the back.  No thrashing at all anymore, it seems to favor the ReadyBoost.

Re superfetch. I dunno, may turn it back on. Not sure it was better or not. Like you I use 4GB of ReadyBoost. Had that since I built the system and I think it is worth it.

djp952:

Kingtone:

4. Changed my processor performance settings to Background Services instead of Programs.

I'm not sure this was a good idea to improve the performance of Media Center, per se, but I would love to know your results.  Do you actually see any performance gains on the extenders with this set?

I can say that my extender (HP Mediasmart) seems more responsive with TV Pack than before. Does this tweak help? Still testing. Have not seen any adverse effects. I figure ehome and other Media Center services run in the background so I might as well slide priority their way.

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Home Built Media Server | Vista Ultimate (x86) | HP MediaSmart Connect Extender | www.techlifeweb.com

The TV Pack ran like a dog (hanging, minute freezes etc) over my Xbox 360 (UK using two DVB-Ts) until the "MHEG Addin" crashed:

http://www.edandersen.com/stuff/tvpackcrash.jpg

Disabled it using the option and now its fine! Works a charm!

edandersen:

The TV Pack ran like a dog (hanging, minute freezes etc) over my Xbox 360 (UK using two DVB-Ts) until the "MHEG Addin" crashed:

http://www.edandersen.com/stuff/tvpackcrash.jpg

Disabled it using the option and now its fine! Works a charm!

Interesting! Thanks for posting this. I'll take a look but I don't think we have this in the US. Anyone know otherwise?

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Home Built Media Server | Vista Ultimate (x86) | HP MediaSmart Connect Extender | www.techlifeweb.com