hi Felixk,  Just wondering when will .30 be released as a WHQL driver?

Where can I get the .30 drivers. All I see on the site is .29 I'm just installing two m780 tuners and would like to start off right.

Blunderdog:

Where can I get the .30 drivers. All I see on the site is .29 I'm just installing two m780 tuners and would like to start off right.

Doh! I just found the link a few pages earlier

I have two AverMedia tuners in my 32-bit Vista Media Center machine; an M780 PCIe card and an A868 "Volar" external USB stick.  I use only the ATSC capabilities.  The system used to work reliably, but a few months ago began to bluescreen if a scheduled recording started while watching a DVD. 

I installed the beta ".30" M780 drivers this morning.  I've now tested the failure scenario three times without a bluescreen.  I was even able to start two overlapping scheduled recordings while watching a DVD.

Lookin' good so far, Felix!

-- Pete 

I have two M780 cards, and occasionally when I reboot, one of them disappears.  The Vista Device Manager only shows one of them.  Rebooting will normally clear it up.  I've tried re-seating the cards and that didn't fix the problem.  I've run it with TV Pack, and now I'm doing a fresh install without TV Pack and just noticed the problem again.  Anyone else see this?  I'm running .30 drivers.  Any point in going back to .29?  Any settings in the BIOS I could change (maybe something is timing out before detecting one of the cards?)

My experience so far with the M780 has shown that the SD/Analog performance is poor.

My setup:

Acer X1200
AMD Athlon X2 64 4850e
Nvidia 8200 IGP
Avermedia M780 Tuner
Vista Home Premium x64

I have the STB's S-video out connect to the S-video in of my M780 for for SD/analog TV in VMC.

I saw mention in another post (see below) that the Avermedia M780 suffers from overly aggressive noise filtering etc. He also mention that he thought ATI tuners were better/best for analog SD.

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/post/174524.aspx

This might explain the poor performance issue that I'm seeing (artifacts and ghosting with motion).

I've also read post where people have tried to find out how to turn filtering off with this card, but have had no luck. Is this possible?

In another post I saw the following:

"I loaded up the following filters in graphedit and notice that this analog tuner problem does not seem to occur there, so this tells me that some noise correction or deinterlacing filter is adversely affecting analog tuner-based picture quality.  I believe somebody else here mentioned that they felt that the noise reduction was too aggressive.  I agree with them.

AVerMedia M780 PCIe TV-Tuner

AVerMedia M780 PCIe Crossbar

AVerMedia M780 PCIe Capture

Video Renderer (the one with the MERIT_PREFERRED value.)

Using graphedit, the analog tuner quality is identical to what my cable box produces.  I would like to see this quality in either VistaMC or AVerMC.  As a side note, in AVerTV6, if you disabled the "Video Quality Enhancement" feature, this problem did not seem to be present."

So what's up with that?

Would it be beneficial to get an ATI tuner card and us it for the source for TV in VMC (while still using the M780 for clear QAM in VMC)?

I was not impressed with the analog signal to begin with either, but then I realized my STB was not displaying an analog signal, but rather encrypted QAM, so it wasn't a fair comparison.  It was pretty bad though, so I reduced the number of splits before the signal made it to my box, and installed a signal booster, and right now I'm fairly impressed with the signal.  So you might want to try that before you try another tuner.  I used the following signal booster and it made a big difference:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000066E6Y

woolooloo:

I was not impressed with the analog signal to begin with either, but then I realized my STB was not displaying an analog signal, but rather encrypted QAM, so it wasn't a fair comparison.  It was pretty bad though, so I reduced the number of splits before the signal made it to my box, and installed a signal booster, and right now I'm fairly impressed with the signal.  So you might want to try that before you try another tuner.  I used the following signal booster and it made a big difference:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000066E6Y

What difference does any of that make? I connect the STB to the Tuner via S-Video. The STB receives the signal via digital encrypted QAM. So, basically the STB outputs near perfect NTSC - at the appropriate video levels - via S-Video. I can't see how boosting the signal is going to improve the digital side of the house. Either you get it or you don't. When I connect the STB directly to the HDTV - via S-Video - the picture is fine.

The more I keep searching - the more I keep coming across post that state the m780 has too agressive noise reduction/temporal denoise issues that cannot be addressed.

From what I've been able to put together so far is that the only option is to go with a card that has better analog performance. I'll have to keep the m780 for it's VMC QAM compatibility, but for analog I'm starting to think a second card is in order.

You're right, brain fart on my end. I'm using the NTSC tuner, not analog.

My tuner also keeps dissappearing after a re-start or resume from standby. I have installed KB928135 manually (per Felix) only for things to work one time. Does anyone else have this problem and a solution?

Thx.

I just want to report in and say that my initial tests with the .30 drivers have solved my BSOD issues. I watched some ATSC TV last night, put the PC to sleep and later the PC woke it self up to record a scheduled show and had no problems! So far so good, I will report back in after a week or two with the final verdict.

Thanks again!

---

Windows Vista Ultimate (x86) SP1
Antec Fusion 430
AMD X2 4850e (2.5GHz)
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 RAM
Pioneer DVD+/-RW DVR-112D
250GB Seagate Barracuda HD
2x 1TB WD Green HD
2x AverMedia M780 ATSC/NTSC

bobbyh7:

My tuner also keeps dissappearing after a re-start or resume from standby. I have installed KB928135 manually (per Felix) only for things to work one time. Does anyone else have this problem and a solution?

Bobby, I think I resolved my issue, although I need more time to confirm.  Basically, if I firmly seat the card, then screw it in, it seems to kind of tilt the card at a slight angle in the PCIe slot, and I think that might be causing the problem.

So instead, I am firmly seating it flat and not screwing it in.  Less than ideal since shifting the case around with the 2 stiff coax cables sticking off the card can move the card around.  My case comes with a "screwless" card holder that I don't like because it doesn't seem secure, but I'm using it now.

As of yesterday morning, I had completely lost one of my cards.  After doing this and going through probably 5 reboots yesterday, my system has recognized both cards every time.  As I said, time will tell, but I'm optimistic. 

Strangely enough, this only happens with one of my cards, even if I switch the two cards back and forth between slots, it was always the same card giving me problems.

First thanks for the reply. I wish that were the case, but I have already tried that. My problem is, restart looses the tuner but full shutdown and powering back on brings back the tuner back just fine. This bugs me, because I finally have QAM working perfectly, just cannot put the machine on standby.

I too am interested in an answer to this question.  How do we turn off the noise reduction capability with this card?  The analog image has given me issue since day one.  It is a very hard thing to describe the image that you get.  It's more than just blurry it's also sort of washed out like it needs gamma correction.  But the weirdest part of it is that especially on facial close-ups it gives the appearance that a person's head or body is moving but their eyes and forehead are not - like their definitely not part of that body - it is really a weird effect and it makes your own eyes hurt trying to focus and keep up with the image.  If this is in fact a noise reduction action I do wish there was a way to turn it off so that the user can evaluate whether they prefer the altered image or the unaltered image.  It could be that the picture would be worse with the noise reduction off but we have no way of knowing because we don't have the option of turning it on or off

Can anyone from Avermedia comment?

 

---

EZEd

EZEd:

I too am interested in an answer to this question.  How do we turn off the noise reduction capability with this card?  The analog image has given me issue since day one.  It is a very hard thing to describe the image that you get.  It's more than just blurry it's also sort of washed out like it needs gamma correction.  But the weirdest part of it is that especially on facial close-ups it gives the appearance that a person's head or body is moving but their eyes and forehead are not - like their definitely not part of that body - it is really a weird effect and it makes your own eyes hurt trying to focus and keep up with the image.  If this is in fact a noise reduction action I do wish there was a way to turn it off so that the user can evaluate whether they prefer the altered image or the unaltered image.  It could be that the picture would be worse with the noise reduction off but we have no way of knowing because we don't have the option of turning it on or off

Can anyone from Avermedia comment?

 

Good question. So far - from what I've been able to gather - is that you can't turn it off. From what I've seen posted (see post above) this card can produce good analog when building a graph. But how to get this performance in VMC is and unknown. I wish there was a way. For the time being - my solution is going to get another card that doesn't have this problem for analog.