So far, 3.5 smooth as SILK w/ Nvidia!

[Josch]

Hello all. I just wanted to come on and share my experiences w/ my recent upgrade/procedures that have led to flawless operation so far.
I originally was a 3.4 customer, who then became a BETA 3.5 user/ 'tester' (although I never posted any bug reports because I suck). Through several beta releases I loved all the many new features, but there were always quarks with the smooth running of it, day in and day out. System would always freeze up on me, and was full of bugs (most others in the Beta arena did a very THOROUGH and excellent job of reporting any and every bug that hampered BTV from running like a finely tuned automobile). But I have to say that the new public release of 3.5 is wonderful. Some have been complaining though, that w/ the required new Hauppauge drivers, the image quality has been worse than before (not as clear). This is not true for me. My quality has been getting better and better w/ many of the new beta releases, and now with this new 3.5 final release, it is just as good as the satellite input after it comes out the TV out of my Nvidia vid card and even better on the deinterlaced picture of my monitor (I believe the newest Nvidia drivers may have improvements as well in the deinterlacing on the monitor out?)


Basically, here was my series of events to upgrade this time around:

-First, I uninstalled my older Nvidia GeForce vid card drivers, rebooted and ran the current driver .exe file off of the Nvidia site that is up to date (7-15-04) for my video card, then rebooted (without running Windows own hardware installer- just cancelled out of that and ran the Nvidia exe file). Then set it up for 'Dualview' with TV out as primary moniter, and moniter 1 as secondary, but the secondary (moniter 1) has my taskbar, start menu, and all icons on it, but BTV always starts only on the primary display. And I can surf or run any other program from moniter 1 while BTV runs separate on TV out. It has to be primary though, in order to have picture on it though (something to do with VMR only working in primary moniter?), so if I want to view TV on the moniter then I just switch the primary to the other moniter 1 and it changes just that and my icons and start menu all stay put and don't move.

...anyway

-Then I went to Microsoft and got the new DirectX 9c upgrade and extracted/ran that exe installer, and rebooted.

-Then I went to Hauppauge site and downloaded the current ver. 1.8A (6-16-04) into a temp directory, unzipped it, AND I DID NOT run the HCWclear utility (since I have a working remote and all now, and didn't want to do a complete removal but just an upgrade of the actual drivers). So instead, I just went into Device Manager and found PVR-350 properties (under 'Sound, Video, and Game controllers'), and used the 'UPDATE DRIVER' feature in Windows XP and then I Browsed and pointed it to look into the temp directory that I had previously unzipped the hauppauge .zip file into. After that, Windows loaded the new drivers, and then I rebooted again. Now after re-boot, I remembered that many complained that they thought the new drivers were not as clear so I went into regedit and checked on the 'sharpness' setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ Globespan \ Parameters \ ivac15 \ Driver \ SharpnessValue and sure enough, the new driver turned me back down from '6' to '2'. So I went back to '6'. The range is from 1-7 I believe. Then while I was in there, I stopped by:
HKLM \ Software \ IviSDK4Hauppauge \ Common \ VideoDec \ Dxva
&
HKLM \ Software \ IviSDK4Hauppauge \ Common \ VideoDec \ Hwmc
also:
HKLM \ Software \ Intervideo \ Custom \ Hauppauge \ VideoDec \ Dxva
&
HKLM \ Software \ Intervideo \ Custom \ Hauppauge \ VideoDec \ Hwmc
and changed all 4 of those to a value of '1' (not sure if it still helps on 3.5, but I did it anyway).

-Then I went into 'Nvidia GEforce FX 5500 Properties' and found 'Performance & Quality Settings' and switched the 'Vertical Sync' to always 'on' since that helped picture quality (fixed artifact problem on fast horizontal screen movements). I did this because it always had fixed this on my previous installs of BTV w/ my Nvidia

-Then I uninstalled BTV 3.5 (previously had build 1774 beta), and ran the installer for 3.5 final release, and all went well. In Web Admin, went through an changed all the usual things to make it how I like it. Changed 'Best' quality to 'show more options' and to VBR 5000-9000, DVD Stream, 2, 5, etc.
Recording prefs to 'best quality'
Playback settings: 'Preferred Mpeg Decoder' to 'InterVideo Video Decoder' (which is NOT the same as the not so great nonCSS Intervideo decoder. The InterVideo Video Decoder comes with WinDVD4 which I think is a MUST because this decoder is even better than the new Snapstream decoder that comes with 3.5 (in my opinion). On my machine it is for sure. Also, the de-interlace type I set to: 'Hardware'

-I also had to ad the <Property><Name>TryCC</Name><Value>1</Value></Property> command back into the 'Settings.xml' file to get my Closed Captioning to work again (you have to read the rest of the .pdf file here: http://josch.wilksfamily.com/CC.pdf to make sure you get the rest of it configured to work if you want that feature on yours.

FOLLOWING instruction is only for MyIR blaster victoms:

I also had to uninstall the My.TV myIR program and re-install it so it would re-install the irtuner.dll back into the BTV folder in: C:\Program Files\SnapStream Media\Beyond TV 3 (so BTV can change the channels via MyIR blaster). Then to complete that package, you have to put the old file called 'DeviceCollection.xml' into the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SnapStream\Beyond TV folder. Then you go to WebAdmin again and in 'Audio & Video Inputs' and 'Edit Settings' you can select 'External Tuning' and you will now see the 'MyBlaster Device Tuner' finally show up on the list.

And this is about all I did this time around, and now the picture is better than ever, and the interface hasn't froze up once. It used to freeze up most often if you tried to use the Hauppauge remote and shuffled through the FF and RW buttons and scan through a show too fast and it would always eventually freeze the interface (like every 2-10 minutes). I think the video drivers or the DX9c had something to do with that? But now it's like mega smoooth, and the BTV UI is so hi-tech lookin now, I just feel like one heck of a satified customer now. It's like all this patience has paid off. Another good bug they fixed is now the UI interface is propely sized in the screen while you playback or watch LiveTV, and it doesn't shrink or grow. That fixed itself with the latest Nvidia driver though.

Now that my PC is running so perfect, I'm gonna go and burn a ghost image of th HD before some virus comes along and overturns my system.

Anyways, thanks Snapstream! I'm happy as a clown now. I'm sure if any other bugs surface you guys will figure them out pretty fast

[dequire]

Nice post and description!

[flavius]

Thanks, for sharing this. I'm going to switch to TV-Out soon, so this will probably be helpful.

[Josch]

Your welcome.

forgot to say that I also have the irremote.ini file modified so that the 'GO' button in the upper right corner of the Hauppauge silver remote now launches the BTV fullscreen UI (mode fs), and I also set the blank button in between the 'Mute' and the 'Full' buttons, set that middle one to be the same as the 'Back/Exit' button. And I also set the Red button to be the Alt + tab keystroke. There just a couple little things I know, but they really help make the program more 'turn key', so your not always 'under the hood'
I've actually had those things in place a long time ago, but I figure it was worth mentioning since they are pretty simple mods that can make a big difference in usability out of this program in the real world

[david@my.tv]

Hi - you don't have to do those workarounds to get MyBlaster working with BTV 3.5, the instructions are at http://www.mytvstore.com/snapstream.html

[Josch]

Cool, I'm glad to hear they fixed it That will be nice

[ynnek888]

I agree too.

I also found setting Nvidia's digital vibrance to the low setting greatly helped the washed out look when using 3d acceleration mode. Now its really hard to tell the difference between live TV and recorded tv.

[Iandyr]

I am not a BTV user at the moment (I am using mediaportal). By using the coolbits hack to the NVIDIA drivers and click the "enable VMR" I can watch videos on the secondary screen - while playing games on the primary. This should work in BTV as well. That way I do not have to change between primary and secondary screen.

"It has to be primary though, in order to have picture on it though (something to do with VMR only working in primary moniter?), so if I want to view TV on the moniter then I just switch the primary to the other moniter 1 and it changes just that and my icons and start menu all stay put and don't move."