Windows 7 and Beyond TV Compatability

[DancesWithLysol]

Originally Posted by vidiot1985

Is UAC security stuff still in issue with Win7 and BTV? On my Vista system with BTV Link, whenever the secure desktop comes up to ask me something, the Link playback goes nuts and maybe comes back to normal if I wait around long enough, but I usually end up killing it and restarting.

Or am I the only BTV user who hasn't turned off secure desktop on a Vista machine?

I've run into that BTV Link bug/artifact before. I just closed/opened BTV Link again when I ran into that bug. UAC doesn't prompt much once you have everything installed/configured, so I didn't disable it. I could see a good case for disabling UAC on a dedicated HTPC, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it for your desktop if you use it to surf the internet.

[TheAlien]

I'm running Beyond TV 4.9.2 Build 6323 on my machine using Windows 7, 64 Bit. Yes, there is the Aero thing, but that's been fixed by just using the setup, as noted earlier.

However, there is one remaining problem I AM having that has caused me to revert to Media Center (which I really don't like, thus the original purchase of Beyond TV back in version 3); using it on Dual Monitors. I want to use it on the secondary monitor. I like being able to watch TV on my secondary monitor while I continue working on the primary. With all other version of Windows, there was a fairly easy fix using Regedit, changin the TwinView setting to 0. This however, does not work with Windows 7. Does anyone know of a fix for this?

SideNote: I found this out by accident. There's a codec for Media Player Classic called 3DFier. If you install this, and Media Player Classic, then enable it, it follows through to Beyond TV. In other words, all my TV can be in 3D if I want. Pretty cool! So, get out your Red/Cyan 3D glasses from the junk drawer and have fun!

[TheAlien]

***Update***

Sorry, I just found the solution to my dual monitor problem. After doing a little more searching HERE (rather than just google) I found the solution under the HDMI thread. I changed the playback settings to 3D instead of Overlay and that fixed it (in conjunction with the registry fix). However, that kills the 3D cool effect I mentioned. Well, at least I know there is a way to switch between the two. If I wanna watch in 3D, change the setting under Playback to Overlay and watch it on my Primary Display. If I wanna watch on the secondary monitor, change the setting back to 3D. Confusing ain't it?

Either way, I can now do both with a simple click.

Now, GO TRY THAT 3D EFFECT I WAS TELLING YA ABOUT! Seriously, it's pretty cool. Let me know what you all think.

[doncorneo]

Since my first post I have installed W7 HP 64-bit. And though my old tuner was supported for W7 RC, ATI decided not to support it for RTM so I have replaced it with a Hauppauge 2250 HVR MC-kit Dual Tuner (which I am very happy with). One of my video cards went bad so I had to replace them also.

Since I had given up on BTV during RC testing and not being able to resolve the video issues, I have stuck with WMC.
Since SS still does not officially support 64-bit OSs, and I want something that works "out-of-the-box" I have not tried BTV since installing W7 HP 64-bit.

As noted by another poster, one of the options I can think of that BTV had that WMC doesn't is showsqueeze. And like the other poster, I really didn't use it anyway. The few bells and whistles WMC is missing compared to BTV are not worth paying for.
Right now my main reasons for sticking with WMC over BTV is that WMC uses less than half of the resources that BTV does and that WMC supports Closed Captioning.

It appears (based on what I have read in these forums) that BTV also has problems with showing and recording unencrypted HD. WMC does this with no problems and very little setup effort. And editing the HD channels is fairly easy in WMC, compared to what I have read about BTV. When you have both HD and SD channels available, you can very easily set the recording options to chose HD over SD when available.

SS needs to take a really good look at WMC and figure out how to make BTV more like WMC, especially the resource management. MS programs are usually bloated and waste resources, but BTV makes even Windows ME seem like an excellently written piece of software.

If SS comes out with an official 64-bit supported BTV, trimmed the resource hogging down and added CC, I'd be willing to check it out. But as for now, WMC is a much, much better program and for the first time since Windows 2.0 I actually like a MS software product.

[opilion]

Originally Posted by doncorneo

But as for now, WMC is a much, much better program and for the first time since Windows 2.0 I actually like a MS software product.

While I agree that SnapStream has gone AWOL over the past several months, from a straight PVR perspective, BTV still offers way more flexibility and options than WMC. Off the top of my head:

1. Folder support - I can record all of the kids shows and my wife's shows to separate folders
2. Web Admin - I can schedule recordings remotely over the web
3. Greater scheduling flexibility
4. Software based extender - runs on an old laptop rather than having to purchase a $300 extender or an XBOX360
5. Commercial skipping

Others - help me out...

[ZetaVu]

doncorneo, I don't understand your posting here other than to try and spam for WMC. You clearly haven't researched your problems properly. BTV has no issues playing unencrypted HD content. QAM setup can be complicated depending on your device, but the support is better than WMC. BTV has better out of the box support for the HD PVR (even though it is not "official") and offers more freedom and flexibility than WMC for PVR functions. BTV does not support 64bit, mostly related to drivers and other tweaks, and since so few users try 64 bit (seriously, other than more than 4gb memory, why bother?) they haven't focused all their energy on it. The majority of issues people are having in W7 is with tuners and drivers, and I see a plethora of similar problems in the WMC forums. My only complaint is that H.264 hardware acceleration does not work in Windows 7, again, more changes m$ made to make their products work better and make competing products have more difficulty.

Oh, and I ran WMC and compared to BTv resource wise, WMC uses significantly more resources in idle (its default phoning home and whatever tweaking of all my media files) than BTV in idle. If you are having high cpu on BTV idle, then you have an install issue. Unless smartchapter, showsqueeze, guide update or library detection are occuring (these are features you can turn on or off) then btvnetworkservices should be idle. If not, something is wrong, period. Tell me why WMP nework services tries to run at 25% cpu whenever I open WMC?

If you want help with BTV, ask a question, if you just want to rip on it and spam for the lame bloatware that is WMC, don't bother.

[RiderFan]

We all know that 64 bit MUST be twice as good as 32 bit.

[DancesWithLysol]

Originally Posted by RiderFan

We all know that 64 bit MUST be twice as good as 32 bit.

Exactly, 32-bit addressing ought to be enough for anybody. I don't even know why we bother with 64-bit addressing.

</sarcasm>

[ZetaVu]

Seriously, for a computer running basically an htpc program (BTV or other) what benefit would I see with 64 vs 32? I pretty much have 2gb on all my systems, don't see a need to go to 4gb (of which 32 only sees 3.5) but if someone shows me a good enough reason to throw out another $50-100 let me know. Then going to 64, where would I see the advantage. This computer only runs BTV, Media Portal, Firefox, I showsqueeze, burn dvd's, that's about it. What advantage does 64 offer and how significant is that advantage?

[cfaslave]

NOTE: This comment has nothing to do with "the competition" of Snapstream. Its just an observation about 64bit since that's been an issue around here. None of my HTPC computers use 64bit although I did just upgrade my HTPC server from XP to Windows 7 (32bit) last weekend. When I went to Windows 7 for my OS I did not install the 64bit version because there are still many software programs that don't support it. But most of all there's no firewire driver for 64bit and that's a show-stopper for my HTPC server.

I don't see that 64 is a huge improvement - especially with HTPCs. But it has become very common to find a computer or laptop that has the 64bit version already installed on it. I just purchased two laptops with it pre-installed and will likely be getting a Lenovo that doesn't even come with 32bit.

I'm not saying it's a must-have or anything - just that 64bit is becoming more and more prevalent and software companies will need to address it or it becomes a big deterrent for buying that software.

[DancesWithLysol]

Originally Posted by ZetaVu

Seriously, for a computer running basically an htpc program (BTV or other) what benefit would I see with 64 vs 32? I pretty much have 2gb on all my systems, don't see a need to go to 4gb (of which 32 only sees 3.5) but if someone shows me a good enough reason to throw out another $50-100 let me know. Then going to 64, where would I see the advantage. This computer only runs BTV, Media Portal, Firefox, I showsqueeze, burn dvd's, that's about it. What advantage does 64 offer and how significant is that advantage?

I didn't say that every application would see an immediate benefit from 64-bit, aside from a relatively minor speedup from getting extra registers (16 registers in x86-64 vs plain x86) if it gets recompiled for 64-bit.

What I was poking fun at was the general statement from RiderFan suggesting that 64-bit processors don't provide a benefit. What I was doing was reminding him that some people said the same thing about the 16-bit to 32-bit transition by paraphrasing the famous 640k quote that was wrongly attributed to Bill Gates. Someone like Zeta may have come along in 1990 and said "Hey, I can run WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 123, and Prince of Persia - what do I need 32-bits for?" and they would have been right for those particular applications. But with hindsight I think we can all agree that 32-bit addressing is much more than "twice as good" as 16-bit addressing.

Anyone who suggests a fixed amount of anything should meet everyone's needs obviously hasn't been around computers very long, or hasn't been paying attention.

[vidiot1985]

Originally Posted by DancesWithLysol

... But with hindsight I think we can all agree that 32-bit addressing is much more than "twice as good" as 16-bit addressing.
...

I estimate that it is 65,537 times as good :-).

[vidiot1985]

Well, I tried installing the BTV 4.9.2 on my Windows 7 64-bit system and I'm having no luck getting a QAM AutoScan to work using the HDHR tuners.

It either hangs after a while (and cannot be stopped/cancelled, I have to kill the process), or it scans all the frequencies but finds no channels (but the HDHR utilities to scan and view channels work fine).

I've tried all the "Advanced" tips in the KB for QAM lineup scanning (as well as disabling the Media Center receiver service thing) and none of them are doing any good. From what I've read, other folks have had problems with HVR-1600 and QAM autoscans too, so I assume it's not an HDHR specific issue, but who knows.

The next thing I'm going to try is restoring my backed up BTV settings from my current XP machine, but I have my doubts that telling BTV to go to a channel will work any better than having it scan for channels since the scan finds none at all.

I also had some trouble with W7 Media Center in setting up QAM. It found 15 channels rather than the 40+ that the HDHR tools finds. But I suspect that it discarded some channels it thought were duplicates since I saw the count go as high as 17 channels before it settled back down to 15. I ended up manually adding/mapping all 40+ channels, kinda like we have to do with BeyondTV to get a full lineup with all the channels, subchannels and otherwise not-found channels setup in the guide and it works OK. But I still like BTV better--if only I could get it to work on my new machine.

[vidiot1985]

Originally Posted by richt

I am currently running BTV on Win7 64bit and also on Win7 32bit with none of the problems mentioned above. The 64bit instance has been promoted to my main HTPC.

Rich, I see you have an HDHR in your setup. When you setup BTV on your Win7 64-bit system, did you do a QAM autoscan on the new system? Or did you restore a backed up BTV config from your other machine?

[richt]

Originally Posted by vidiot1985

Rich, I see you have an HDHR in your setup. When you setup BTV on your Win7 64-bit system, did you do a QAM autoscan on the new system? Or did you restore a backed up BTV config from your other machine?

I did all new scans, and it worked fine. I stopped using QAM shortly afterwards though. Got tired of cable costs and dropped it.