Thanks, Questions and associated Ramblings...

[GlenR]

First of all a big thank you to everyone who has answered my questions while getting my MCE box running. I had enough time over this Christmas break to really concentrate on it and I now have a pretty stable box that is doing most of what I want.

Along the way I have learnt heaps from you guys and, while it's been frustrating sometimes, it was great fun. So, an update as to where I'm at might be in order, and perhaps some things will help others out there.

My setup is as per my signature, added to which I will say I am running PowerDVD5 with the codec patched to V 6.0.0.1014, and it seems to be working fine. BRP v3 with FreeXMLTV v1.5 are doing a sterling job of giving me an EPG - thanks Monster & Impact - and I would recommend these to everyone. As I said, a pretty stable and useable box now hums quietly in my lounge room.

Live TV is going well with the image skipping infrequently, although I did lose a bit of WAF on NYE when channel nine started to drop out half way through the fireworks. I'm not sure whether this was an MCE or a transmission issue. On the whole, very watchable, I believe the occasional skipped frame is just one of those things about digital transmissions.

Cooling surprised me. I have not seen my CPU temp rise much above 40C and the system above 43C, yet I am using standard fans. The two rear case fans are connected to the Abit OTES system and have never kicked in (I did test them once by lowering their thresholds, just to be sure), the front case fan is powered directly from the PSU, so is always on and the CPU fan is the one that came with the AMD chip and rarely runs above 3000rpm. The loudest thing on my system is the DVD drive when it spins right up. The machine is dead quite when I sit in the lounge and I haven't had to go out and by any after-market cooling systems. I am really impressed with the Silverstone case.

My DSE (Sun-Wave) programmable remote was a great value find. it works like a charm, was under $100 and, while I would like a little more flexibility in the set up, is excellent value for money. Again, I recommend this remote to anyone whose budget doesn't extend to things like the Harmoy 880.

I still have a few niggles and questions, so if anyone can shed some light on these it would be appreciated. I feel I'm so close to the perfect set up I can almost taste it! Most of my outstanding issues are floating in various threads, but I thought I would consolidate them here.

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First, DVD playback still stutters on some discs. This is my biggest bug-bear. Those of you who have followed my attempts at resolution on this thread My DVD drive is possessed! will know the details. The only thing I haven't tried is a small tweak mentioned in a couple of threads

My Channel Nine stutter fix

http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/comm...3602#post43602

and referred to in MagpieMDP's clean set up guide - the reg hack for bandwidth.

Although I have an image of my build, I am still reluctant to take my jackboots for a little stroll through the registry without understanding what I am doing. Can someone please tell me what this key actually is? Is it a possible fix for my DVD problems? And should I just do the one in the guide, or all instances as per the threads?

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The iMon remote software doesn't seem to allow letters to be entered using the number keypad as the M$ remote obviously does. I have been led to believe this has no fix, but it would be good to have this feature. I think it may just be one of those things I have to put up with, though.

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Finally, I am frustrated that I cannot get DVR-MS files into vanilla MPEG2 or whatever so I can edit and burn to a standard DVD. I have tried averything, I think, and it seems that it's now a waiting game while those who have good programming skills fix what RU2 seems to have "broken". If anyone knows a trick that will let me do this, let me know.

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Sorry for the long post, but I thought some of you may want to know where it's all at here. A lot of work over the last week is really paying off. Once again thanks to all, and if you can help resolve my last few issues, please do.

[Georgea]

Originally Posted by GlenR

First of all a big thank you to everyone who has answered my questions while getting my MCE box running. I had enough time over this Christmas break to really concentrate on it and I now have a pretty stable box that is doing most of what I want.

SNIP

Finally, I am frustrated that I cannot get DVR-MS files into vanilla MPEG2 or whatever so I can edit and burn to a standard DVD. I have tried averything, I think, and it seems that it's now a waiting game while those who have good programming skills fix what RU2 seems to have "broken". If anyone knows a trick that will let me do this, let me know.

Hi GlenR, I can recommend VideoRedo Plus which supports the RU2 DVR-MS format.

Cheers,

George.

[philzgr8]

Originally Posted by Georgea

Hi GlenR, I can recommend VideoRedo Plus which supports the RU2 DVR-MS format.

Hi Georgea, Have you done any testing on that? My understanding last time I checked was that the author still does not "support" RU2 while he claims it works. I decided not to worry about it for now and I'm also not sure that it will produce anything more than an edited DVR-MS file even if it does work. I'd be interested to know if you have used it.

Oh and Glen... well done mate... looks like all the hard work is starting to pay off.

[Georgea]

Originally Posted by philzgr8

Hi Georgea, Have you done any testing on that? My understanding last time I checked was that the author still does not "support" RU2 while he claims it works. I decided not to worry about it for now and I'm also not sure that it will produce anything more than an edited DVR-MS file even if it does work. I'd be interested to know if you have used it.

Oh and Glen... well done mate... looks like all the hard work is starting to pay off.

Hi Phil,
Yes it does, I've been testing a beta, but I've just checked and there is a full release now (see below)
Cheers,

George.
Version 2-2-1-445, Release date: January 3, 2006

• Enhance: Added support for Beyond TV transport streams. Metadata will be copied if both source and output streams are of the same type. I.e. Program Stream source, Program Stream destination, Transport Stream source with Transport Stream destination.
• Enhance: Support for Tivo To Go Files. VideoReDo will now read .tivo files downloaded from your Series 2 Tivo. Requires the Tivo reader and media access key which are part of the free Tivo To Go package. Please see the Tivo site for information and downloads.
• Enhance: Reading and editing of DVR-MS (MCE) files are now fully supported. They can be opened and edited as you would any other MPEG file.
• Enhance: A Plot Mask has been added to the View menu. When enabled a portion of the video picture will be covered so as not to spoil the story line. The size of the plot mask can be adjusted using the Tools>Options Menu.
• Enhance: All source audio formats may be transcoded to either stereo WAV/LPCM or stereo MPEG audio via the Options button on the File Save Dialog. Useful for translating AC3 source material for devices which do not support it (i.e. Hauppauge Media MVP). Also useful for compressing LPCM/WAV audio to the much smaller MPEG audio format.
• Enhance: The previous maximum video length of 13 hours has been removed. Source material up to 26 hours may now be edited.
• Enhance: An option to reduce the CPU priority while saving has been added to the Tools>Options>Plus screen. Enabling this option will lower the CPU priority of VideoReDo Plus while saving your edits or joins.
• Enhance: Auto repeat has been added to the forward and backward navigation buttons. If you press and hold the left mouse button for more than 0.5 seconds on any of these six buttons ,the navigation function will repeat until release the button.
• Enhance: Ability to set the degree of re-synchronization sensitivity on the Tools>Options>Stream Page.
• Enhance: Ability to select multiple files at file open and combine them into one logical file. Useful for editing DVD material or transport files which have been split into separate files by a capture file. A dialog box can be displayed giving you the open of combining the files or joining them. Please see the help file for an explanation on the differences between combining and joining.
• Enhance: More COM functions to support transport output and scene markers.
• Change: The encoder quality will now default to auto. This will create more compliant files for use with DVD authoring or when outputting to transport streams.
• Change: Output option changes (aspect ratio, GOP size, audio transcoding, etc.) can be set when doing a QuickStream Fix.
• Change: Added new registry option: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\DRD Systems\VideoReDo-Plus\PlaybackDeviceOptions\UseVideoMemory. Set to 1 may decrease flashing on some video cards in RGB mode.
• Change: The installation program will check for running copies of VideoReDo Plus and ask you to close them before continuing.
• Change: QuickStream Fix default output file name will be the defaulted to the file type associated with the output stream type. Previous versions tried to default the output extension to the source file type but this no longer makes sense with all the different source and destination file types being supported.
• Change: Remove stuffing bytes from systems headers to make our VOB files more compatible.
• Change: All output streams are now marked as VBR. <LI class=MsoNormal>
• Change: Clicking on "Trim Unselected" will clear the cut list before adding the new entries.
• Change: Warn the user if outputting to a transport stream and the audio is WAV/LPCM. WAV/LPCM output to a transport stream is not supported.
• Change: Transport Output, first frame is marked with the discontinuity bit.
• Change: Transport Output, much improved PTS/DTS timings.
• Change: When automatic corrections are made to the stream when saving edits, both the input and output time codes will be displayed in the log file.
• Fix: When opening a transport stream, DVB subtitle and teletext streams will not accidentally be interpreted as an audio stream. The "Ignore Program Maps" option on the Tools>Options>Stream page must be off for this improvement to be operational.
• Fix: QuickStream Fix from batch not honoring output options (gop, aspect ratio, etc) settings.
• Fix: Added additional registry parameters to increase the max packet search parameters for Transport Streams.
• Fix: If auto cutting is enabled in AdDetective and the first cut starts at 00:00:00.00, an invalid cut time may be added to the cut list.
• Fix: The CRID delete function would not delete the .fmpg if the current directory was different from the location of the CRID folder.
• Fix: Preserve the PTS/DTS relationship when removing video frames due to audio sync purposes.
• Fix: Trim Unselected would show the wrong length in the on-screen byte length fields.
• Fix: Improve internal timings to better handle TS output. All I and P frames now carry a DTS. Also improves sync with DVDs created by Nero Vision Express.
• Fix: Sampling rate changes for MPEG audio streams would not be detected causing valid audio frames to be incorrectly discarded.
• Fix: Batch now as the capability to specify transport stream output.
• Fix: The Time Remaining on the output progress dialog was not working properly in scene mode.
• Fix: Random crashes on some 1080i HD material.
• Fix: Creating a chapter file would crash program if an ".hh" or ";hh" time code format was used in the chapter file output specification.
• Fix: Improved checking of filenames in auto combine. Will no longer auto combine files such as: abc02.ts with ab01.ts.
• Fix: Missing CRID component files will no longer prevent the file from being opened.
• Fix: Much better processing of Transport Stream files where the time stamps (PTS/DTS) rollover back to 0.
• Fix: DVR-MS files which contained certain accented characters in the file name could not be opened.
• Fix: AC3 frames with a valid signature, but bad data would cause sequential reads to drop all further AC3 frames.
• Fix: After switching from scene to cut mode, preview would display the wrong section of the video until the program was restarted.