Hello,

I'm having an issue using both the Radeon 2600xt and 3850 in Vista Media Center. I'm using the PC to record TV shows off of 2 ATi Digital Cable Tuners with CableCard. My problem is when seeking around in recorded TV shows, the picture on the screen is very slow and completely behind where I am in the seek bar. It is practically unusable for this reason.

For example, while playing back a basketball game, if I fast forwarding at the fastest seek speed, the score and game clock are far behind where the seek bar is. If I fast forward to 1 hour into the game, when I press play the score will jump by like 40 points.

I'm using Catalyst 7.11. Previously, I had an nVidia 8600GTS that didn't have these problems.

Is anyone else experiencing this?  Any suggestions of what can be done to improve this?

Thanks,
Bryan

bryanb:

Hello,

I'm having an issue using both the Radeon 2600xt and 3850 in Vista Media Center. I'm using the PC to record TV shows off of 2 ATi Digital Cable Tuners with CableCard. My problem is when seeking around in recorded TV shows, the picture on the screen is very slow and completely behind where I am in the seek bar. It is practically unusable for this reason.

For example, while playing back a basketball game, if I fast forwarding at the fastest seek speed, the score and game clock are far behind where the seek bar is. If I fast forward to 1 hour into the game, when I press play the score will jump by like 40 points.

I'm using Catalyst 7.11. Previously, I had an nVidia 8600GTS that didn't have these problems.

Is anyone else experiencing this?  Any suggestions of what can be done to improve this?

Thanks,
Bryan

I had an Asrock motherboard, which needed a bios update to cope with Radeon 2X00 cards.

Check for an update

alanroy2:

I had an Asrock motherboard, which needed a bios update to cope with Radeon 2X00 cards.

Check for an update

Be VERY careful about updating your motherboard BIOS if you're using Digital Cable Tuners.  There's a 99.9% chance you won't be able to use your DCTs anymore if you update the BIOS, since the cards are tied to your motherboards OCUR-capable BIOS.

Both of those cards are more than adequate for Media Center.

Follow the usual ritual: ensure you drivers are current, stc.

We are looking at trick mode performance for the next release. Hopefully we can get it to be smoother and more responsive.

I noticed that while playing back a 1080i broadcast on the 3850, GPU activity is around 30% and CPU utilization is around 40%.  When seeking, GPU activity drops to 1% and CPU utilization goes up to 55%.

Not sure if that means anything significant, or just that the GPU is not deinterlacing etc.

It looks like this issue is directly related to digital cable recordings from the ATI Digital Cable Tuner (with CableCard). If I record an analog program on a different tuner, the seeking and skipping is responsive.

The nvidia 8600GT I had previously worked fine with both digital and analog recordings however.  Are others having better luck with seeking/skipping on digital cable recordings with an ATI video card?

Here's another issue that happens that maybe others can verify:

1. Seek to about 15 minutes into a recorded program and begin playing
2. Rewind at max speed
3. When the timeline reaches 0:00, the seek bar stops, but the video displayed continues to rewind very slowly for about 10 more seconds.

iank:

We are looking at trick mode performance for the next release ...

I'd love to know what that means.  What exactly are you looking to optimize? 

fdisker:

iank:

We are looking at trick mode performance for the next release ...

 

I'd love to know what that means.  What exactly are you looking to optimize? 

Hopefully things like making it easier to stop on the frame you're seeing, to make the various FF and RW speeds smoother and to extend better trick modes to media toher than DVR recordings, although that may not be possible since we rely on WMP to play all non DVR content.

No promises, but it's high on our list of things we think could be much better.

Does anyone else out there have an ATI video card and ATI Digital Cable Tuner with CableCard?  I'm curious if I'm the only one seeing this issue.

I have a Dell XPS 420 with an ATI 2600XT and dual ATI digital tuners and I do not have this problem. I have other issues, but definitely not the issue you speak of.

Gabriel

mainsg:

I have a Dell XPS 420 with an ATI 2600XT and dual ATI digital tuners and I do not have this problem. I have other issues, but definitely not the issue you speak of.

Gabriel

Interesting.  Can you confirm that you are not experiencing the issue on Digital Cable channels?  I'm not having the issue on Analog recordings.

I can difinitevly say it is not happening to me. I recorded the Tonight Show in HD last week and was able to FF and RW just fine when I fired it up last night. I also recorded Cyberchase on SD and I can also FF and RW just fine. It is definitely not a card compatability issue.

Gabriel