LASooner:

So USB channel changing lasted about 2 hours, it's really flakey, so I just went back to using IR blaster to do it. It's reliable and my HTPC is in a cabinet anyway.

I did the same thing.

Make sure you disable FireSTB's attempts to change the channel by making the appropriate change in the registry.  If you don't FireSTB will every now and then "try" to change the channel and with both the IR blaster and USB channel changing it will screw up.

LASooner:

Mpeg 4 records, but wow is it ever dodgy. Dish is doing some serious error correction, when I run the captured file through Arcsoft Total Media it looks perfect, when I use Media Center or Mediaplayer it has a lot of glitches, although this varies from channel to channel, ESPN2 recorded fine, but Cinemax had a lot of EC making it look good.

Although I don't receive any mpeg-4, if some software can play it back well, you should be able to tweak the codec merits to make sure the same codec is used in Media Center to play it back.  Get ahold of graphedit to figure out which codecs work.

If you are running Vista, a new version of graphedit is available in the Windows SDK Update for Vista (downloadable from Microsoft) - unfortunately I don't know of any other way to get it (I managed to manually extract it from the SDK, instead of installing the whole SDK).  If you register proppage.dll, then graphedit should be able to examine the graph in use the Total Media (by using the remote graph capability) and you can then tweak the merits so it will also be used by "Intelligent Connect" (Media Center and other DirectX software).  The other option is simply to uninstall the codecs that don't work very well so the Total Media ones end up being used.

LASooner:

I looked through the registry settings for FireSTB, this may sound weird, but is there a way to just have it initiate .ts recording, but NOT try to convert it to DVR-MS? I'd rather convert what I want, if I want, and not have it be an automated process.

Sorry, I don't know.

LASooner:

I've also had a few problems with mytray just disappearing, I downloaded firestb from here http://home.comcast.net/~timmmoore/firewire/readme.htm is this the latest?

That is where you get the latest version from.  Make sure you use the Vista version if you are running Vista and the MCE2005 version if you are running MCE2005.

As long as you have turned off UAC (per the readme you linked to), mytray should work reliably (at least it does on my system).  On the other hand if UAC is on, mytray definitely has issues plus it doesn't start properly (such as after a reboot).

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

Hey Slider, did you have any luck with the "c" version of his driver yet?

 

I set it up on my new rig and I had some mixed results...

How bout an update?

Ok, so I'm just now starting to look at getting a Bell Expressvu HD unit connected to my VMC box and I wanted to know why would I use R5000HD instead of just using an IR blaster and a TV out.... Can someone tell me? Also, I'm confused by the R5000HD website, it says the receiver needs to be modded, but I can't find the details of the mod.

Thanks

boojew:

Ok, so I'm just now starting to look at getting a Bell Expressvu HD unit connected to my VMC box and I wanted to know why would I use R5000HD instead of just using an IR blaster and a TV out.... Can someone tell me? Also, I'm confused by the R5000HD website, it says the receiver needs to be modded, but I can't find the details of the mod.

Thanks

Using an IR blaster and the s-video input on your TV Tuner card will provide you with the ability to record analog video with 480 interlaced horizonal lines of resolution.  The PC will record this analog signal using a resolution of 720x480 (interlaced).  HD channels will be recorded with an effective resolution of 720x360 (360i) due the black bars at the top and the bottom.  The audio is recorded from the analog stereo ports on the TV Tuner card.

The R5000HD enables your PC to record the raw, unaltered digital video stream that your STB would output in HD.  All HD channels are recorded digitally with either a 1280x720 resolution with progressive scanning (60Hz, not interlaced) or a 1920x1080 resolution with interlaced scanning.  Audio on HD channels is almost always in Dolby Digital 5.1 and again recorded digitally.  Some SD channels also use Dolby Digital 5.1.

Comparing an analog 480i recording to a high definition 720p or 1080i digital recording, the difference is absolutely incredible.  The closest comparison would be to compare an analog recording through your s-video port on the TV Tuner card to watching a Bluray movie in HD.  The HD recordings are not quite up to the Bluray standard, but depending on the channel and the show they can be extremely good.

Looking at it from a total number of pixels point of view, 720x360i gives you 259,200 pixels every 30th of a second, while 1920x1080i gives you 2,073,600 pixels every 30th of a second.  1280x720p gives you 921,600 pixels every 60th of a second, or looking at pixels over time, this works out to 1,843,200 pixels every 30th of a second.  Essentially the R5000HD gives you 8 times the resolution compared to an IR blaster and s-video capture on your TV Tuner card, not to mention 6 channels (5.1) of digital audio compared to 2 analog channels.

If you are satisfied with an analog 480i recording, then it probably isn't worth paying the roughly 10x increase in price for the R5000HD solution (assuming you intend to own the STB).

Another option, that unfortunately is not supported by Media Center, is to pick up a Hauppauge HD-PVR and Sage TV.  The Hauppauge HD-PVR is able to record analog HD in either 720p or 1080i.  It isn't a direct digital recording, but it is at least HD.  Currently it only supports stereo audio and Sage TV doen't have as nice a user interface as Media Center.

Note that at this point in time, I am not aware of a single person who has been able to get the R5000HD MCE Virtual Tuner driver to work well enough to use.  Those of us with R5000HD modded STBs are either using FireSTB along with Media Center (Vista or MCE2005), or are running Sage TV (the majority are running Sage TV).

I am using FireSTB and the primary limitation (and it is a fairly big one) is that Live TV is always in SD quality (480i or 360i for HD channels).  Recorded TV on the other hand is incredibly good for all HD channels with the digitally recorded 720p/1080i and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.

Quite honestly, if there was not a way for us to access HD Recorded TV with Media Center, we would not be using it today.  For my wife and I, HD is the #1 requirement for our personal PVR system.  The #2 requirement for us is the ability to network all of our content throughout our home and we have 6 Media Center PCs that can all access all of our media (and this includes networked DVDs; note that Media Center extenders do not support DVD over the network).

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

Thank you for the extremely detailed information. You answered all my questions, except for one: What if I were to use an HDMI capable capture card (http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/09/13/hdmi-capture-card-for-249/)? Not sure if it supports or is supported by VMC.


EDIT: Oops, the card is not supported by VMC. Right. Thanks, then!

I might be that one guy that is using their R500HD virtual driver...

 

But he is correct, it isn't a great solution...yet

Thanks for the responses. In the end, I think I'm going to end up ditching Vista Media Center and just go for independent HD PVRs from Bell. VMC offers more features and I would prefer to keep it, but this is turning out to be tricker (and more expensive!) than I thought it would be.

Thanks

I don't blame you - trying to get HD content into VMC is a nitemare for us CanIndians...

Try to stay tuned however and don't give up hope - I haven't...

Kingbuzzo:

I might be that one guy that is using their R500HD virtual driver...

 

But he is correct, it isn't a great solution...yet

That is good news...

So what can you tell us.

What works?  What doesn't work so well?

How is the audio quality for HD content?

How reliably does it record when switching between SD and HD content (both when recording and when watching Live TV)?

Does the USB channel changing solution work reliably on your system?

Have you had any trouble with corrupt or missing recordings and/or the Recordings.xml file?

Does everything start automatically after a reboot?

How quickly does Live TV recover after a channel change?

What did you need to do to get it to work?

I REALLY want to get the driver working on our system too.  Unfortunately my monthly trial period has now expired and I never managed to get it to work so I'm back to FireSTB again.

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

boojew:

Thanks for the responses. In the end, I think I'm going to end up ditching Vista Media Center and just go for independent HD PVRs from Bell. VMC offers more features and I would prefer to keep it, but this is turning out to be tricker (and more expensive!) than I thought it would be.

Thanks

Unless you are looking for a time consuming hobby, with what is currently available for HD support with VMC and all the limitations with Extenders and sharing content with other Media Center PCs, sticking with a dedicated hardware HD PVR makes more sense for 99.9% of the population.  Obviously if you can't find an HD TV solution that will work for you, there is no point in even considering Media Center.

To me the only real advantages to Media Center (once you get the essential HD working) are:

- Ability to network content to other PCs and Extenders throughout your home (noting Extenders can't view DVD content, and other PCs can't access Live TV and are difficult to set up for Recorded TV).  Although Microsoft made this very difficult to do, it does work - "mostly".

- Ability to add as much hard drive storage as you like and not being limited to less than 30 hours of HD recording (we can record about 200 hours of HD and we typically have about 250 hours split 50/50 between SD and HD).

- Ability to take your recorded TV with you either by burning it to DVD, transferring it to a portable hard drive/laptop, or transferring it to a portable Media Player.

- Ability to have an all in one Media Center that can do what a regular PVR can, plus view Bluray movies, HD-DVD movies, and photographs plus listen to music through a single Media Center device (although these features can often be handled using PVRs or gaming consoles).

To us it is the ability to access all of our content throughout our home on our PCs that makes Media Center worthwhile.  If we didn't have this, we too would be using a hardware PVR.  We do take advantage of Bluray/HD-DVD viewing, having lots of storage and transferring content to our laptop and portable Media Player, but networking is the main selling feature to us (we have 6 Media Center PCs all accessing the same shared content).

The other Media Center "dream" is we all expect to be able to upgrade our software/OS and add the missing functionality, including "official" HD support and supported sharing of TV with other Media Center PCs.  Unfortunately, so far, this "dream" has mostly resulted in disappointment.

If the R5000HD driver worked well this would be an enormous improvement to Media Center, especially for us Canadians.  I would probably start to recommend Media Center and the R5000HD to my friends/family and you.

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

Yes, for me this quickly started out as a hobby. Something to do with my 360 and my over-powered Vista PC w/tuner.... But the more I played the more I loved the concept and the more I wanted (and expected) from the solution. I would really love to to get this working, but the reality is that HD content is a major driver for me and at the moment, I only have 1 TV - so this isn't going to be cost effective. I think once you try and scale past 2 TVs with multiple sources this solution starts to make more sense.

So what can you tell us.

What works?  What doesn't work so well?

It records HD/SD content 80% of the time but I get frequent Media Center Service GPF's almost every other day which require a reboot to resolve.  The LIVE TV functionality works on the PC itself but only works half of the time on the extender and you cannot change the channel from the extender interface at all for some reason.

How is the audio quality for HD content?

Unfortunately, I only have a stereo audio setup so there isn't much I can help you with there - however, I get a strange "burping" noise throughout most of my recordings which would probably be really annoying if I had 5.1 or something - I'm living with it for now and of course my wife cannot hear it at all...

How reliably does it record when switching between SD and HD content (both when recording and when watching Live TV)?

I haven't noticed any difference but I'm on Starchoice...

Does the USB channel changing solution work reliably on your system?

It misses the odd channel change (similar to FireSTB) but there is no ryhme or reason...thank goodness for the satellite time zones and torrents or I would be in real trouble...

Have you had any trouble with corrupt or missing recordings and/or the Recordings.xml file?

Nope, I used to with FireSTB however...

Does everything start automatically after a reboot?

Not exactly...I usually have to wait a few minutes before I crank Live TV or try to record something (and I have a brand new system -> Quad, 3GB, 1TB RAID 0) or I get a generic DISK ERROR message from VMC (only resolved by reboot)

How quickly does Live TV recover after a channel change?

It takes about 5-10 seconds usually...

What did you need to do to get it to work?

I have a newer HPeee VMC connected via USB 2.0 to the Nexxcom-modified Starchoice DSR330 STB - I also have a 360 extender interface for my main TV

I too have struggled with this setup and I am really hoping that it is going to improve.  But judging by the TGB peoples I don't think this is going to get any traction which means they probably won't make their virtual driver any better.

However, it is working "better" than my FireSTB setup was but the LIVE TV thru extender problem is pretty annoying.  I am coping by recording whatever LIVE TV I want to watch and just flipping over to the Recorded TV.

It seems like the HD recordings are way smaller than the FireSTB ones as well.

It will be a cold day in heck before I ever buy another cable-co/satellite stb so I'm sticking with this setup for now...

fingers-crossed...

 

HT Slider:

Kingbuzzo:

I might be that one guy that is using their R500HD virtual driver...

 

But he is correct, it isn't a great solution...yet

That is good news...

So what can you tell us.

What works?  What doesn't work so well?

How is the audio quality for HD content?

How reliably does it record when switching between SD and HD content (both when recording and when watching Live TV)?

Does the USB channel changing solution work reliably on your system?

Have you had any trouble with corrupt or missing recordings and/or the Recordings.xml file?

Does everything start automatically after a reboot?

How quickly does Live TV recover after a channel change?

What did you need to do to get it to work?

I REALLY want to get the driver working on our system too.  Unfortunately my monthly trial period has now expired and I never managed to get it to work so I'm back to FireSTB again.

Kingbuzzo:

So what can you tell us.

What works?  What doesn't work so well?

.....

That sounds utterly terrible and non-functional (by my wife's standards for certain).

I wish Nextcom would put in the effort to make this work properly.  We know it can be done (HDHomerun for example), but we also know Microsoft definitely is making it difficult for Nextcom.

Reading through your comments, one thing tweaked my interest.

You stated that recordings are way smaller than the FireSTB recordings.

They should not be smaller.  Mine are the same size (within a few bytes at least).

One problem I had early on with FireSTB is I kept ending up with very messed up recordings.  Some of them wouldn't even convert to dvr-ms files, others wouldn't play properly, some didn't have any sound, etc.

The "fix" was to change one of the R5000HD DVR settings so instead of sending a constant, spec compliant transport stream rate, to send a "compressed" (null packet stripped) transport stream.  The file size was MUCH smaller using the "compressed" setting, but more importantly my recordings actually worked.

When you use the MCE Virtual Tuner driver, the R5000HD DVR automatically makes this change for you.

Right now with our FireSTB setup almost all of our recordings are made absolutely flawlessly.  No recordings are ever missed.  All of our SD recordings are made through the PVR-250 TV Tuner card (so they work as well as they ever did).  100% of our channel changes work all of the time using the IR blaster (set on the "slow" setting).  Most importantly - All of our HD recordings playback smoothly with flawless Dolby 5.1 audio and the image quality is exceptionally good (when the show was actually created and mastered in HD at least, not upconverted from SD...).  Except...

Once in a while we will find a truncated FireSTB recording.  These days this might happen once out of every 30 HD recordings (97% don't have this issue).  It turns out this almost always happens when the satellite signal strength drops and there is an error in the transport stream (heavy rain, snow, heavy cloud cover, sun spots, etc.).  For some unknown reason TSConverter2.5 is able to take the original transport stream and convert it to a dvr-ms file.  There will often be a glitch at the error, but the new dvr-ms file continues past the error.  We don't loose anything at all (if I notice the short recording), but once in a while I have to pull out the mouse, double click on TSConverter, and re-create the dvr-ms file (since there is now decoding/encoding going on and the MPEG-2 stream is directly passed into a dvr-ms, this typically takes about 90 seconds per hour of recording and this is only using a single CPU core).  I have a custom script that runs every night that deletes .ts files that are older than 3 days so it is possible we could actually loose a show with my current setup.

I'm fairly sure if I put a little effort into this I could actually use DVRMSToolbox to launch a custom script that checks the recording length and if the HD recording is shorter than the SD recording I could automate TSConverter2.5 to re-create the dvr-ms recording and bring our R5000HD recording reliability up to 100%.

Other than these relatively rare glitches (that still bug the heck out of me so I might work on that script), the only negative we have have with our solution is we can't access Live TV in HD (Live TV is always SD).

As I've said before (hoping Nextcom is listening) I would love to have a fully functional R5000HD MC driver that can bring our system to the next level.  With Nextcom's server/client architecture, I believe this will not only bring Live TV in HD to our primary Media Center PC, but it will bring Live TV in HD to all 6 of our Media Center PCs.  This would truly be the ultimate solution and would be quite a bit better than the current FireSTB solution we are using.

Have you submitted a tech support request to Nextcom, telling them about your experience with their driver, and asking them to help you get your system working properly?

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

I wish I had better luck with either solution but this will do for now.

Yes, I spoke with them several times already and they have no idea why I am seeing the gpf's and channel change misses.

They said that it "should" work thru an extender but they never tested that functionality.

It seems like there is always something wrong with my setup (according to them) even though it is brand-new with nothing installed on it.

Oh well, you get what you pay for I guess...

Kingbuzzo:

I wish I had better luck with either solution but this will do for now.

Yes, I spoke with them several times already and they have no idea why I am seeing the gpf's and channel change misses.

They said that it "should" work thru an extender but they never tested that functionality.

It seems like there is always something wrong with my setup (according to them) even though it is brand-new with nothing installed on it.

Oh well, you get what you pay for I guess...

You are not the only one seeing GPFs and channel change misses.

In my limited trial with the driver I saw both of these issues many times.

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote