Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HTPC - Finally! (but have some issues)

OK...watched 'Kingdom of Heaven' all the way through the other night.

I'm still not convinced.

1) hiccups at chapter breaks
2) occasional digital drop outs (3-5x over the course of the movie)
3) still not convinced I'm seeing full 1080p as discovery channel HD looks better, and that's quite compressed. It looks good, but I'm not wowed at all.

A bit of good news though...I finally got sound without using the optical output from my mainboard. (though I don't think my sub is receiving it's signal)

blah...the joy for me in HT is the viewing/listening, not the friggin' around with wires, configurations, and software.

From everything I have read, you don't want to build your own HTPC unless you do enjoy playing around with the wires and software as well. It turns into a hobby all its own, with some of the tweaking that goes on.

I'm holding out for the ones with cablecard built in, because I really want it to record HD more then anything. It looks like those can still only be purchased OEM. While I would probably prefer to build myself, I'd consider just buying a HTPC if the price was right.

What's agravating is that I can't find any good info. No one seems to be able to tell me what's going wrong. Not Nvidia, not Cyberlink, no one on the message boards. The software that comes bundled with the video driver has a zillion and one settings, but no documentation explaining what any of the settings do, or how they should be adjusted. There's a basic "what they are" in the help file, but no practical info on how they should be used/set. Same goes for the PowerDVD software.

grr.

spiffnme,

I've heard horror stories about Nvidia drivers and vista. Most of them go like this:

"Hey...this game works...but I can't set this setting or it will go poof...or...this video works, but it doesn't display right"

I just built a Vista machine for someone and would NOT allow them to buy a Nvidia card. Had to go with ATI.

Since the Blue Ray stuff is so darned...well...complicated and fresh and new, I can't say that anyone knows what the problem is.

But, if I could pick one thing that would probably fix it, it would be getting an ATI card. It's worth a shot. If you still get the same errors, sell it on some hardware enthusiast forum (like hardforum.com) for a little less than what you got it for.

I mean, it sucks, but with the way things are going right now, ATI and Vista are the way to go. I'm running vista right now (got it free from my school...hehe) and it's running flawlessly with my ATI card. No hiccups, glitches, or freezes yet.

It sucks man, I know the feeling. I HATE having computer problems like that. Every time you pop in a movie you get that little queezy feeling in your stomach.

My PC is an HTPC of sorts...so if you have any questions I'll try to help you out. On top of that, I'm on Vista too.

Ya, having a HDDVD or Blu-ray in a HTPC is pretty cutting edge right now.

Have you been focusing your research efforts on Vista+8800 driver issues? That's probably where I'd be putting my efforts into. Do you have any other video cards in the house you could try for a while? I find my 7300GT works perfect for my HTPC. I've had a 6600 in there too which was flawless. And I watch/record HDTV on my box. Looks like a 7600GT is the min for next gen DVD playback thou.

One of the reason's I nested with MCE was the "just works" principle (of course the hardware has to be working). Years ago I played the game of running this software, and that software on my "HTPC" of the time. If you are running Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, you can simply fire up the MCE interface as it's built in.

Oh one other thing, how does the box do everything else? Put the Blu-ray on hold for a moment and make sure everything else works the way you want.

RE: CableCard. I can't stress it enough to anyone looking at those... be sure to check and see what your local cable company has planned for their networks. Time Warner for instance (not my cable co, but my friends) is putting everything new on 'switched video' which means cable card PC's and Tivo and TV's won't work with it. You don't want to drop 2-3 grand on a OEM HTPC to have it work for a year. At least I don't. I've been a bit of a broken record on that, but I'm pretty pissed about the whole cable card thing and want to make sure everyone that is looking at them knows about 'switched video'.

When you talk about 'switched video' are you talking about this ?

I'm trying to get up to speed with current cable practices.

And how would I find out if my cable company (Comcast) is going to be doing this. I don't trust just calling a support person and asking them.

sound
Got the soundcard working. The only issue left with sound is that I can't seem to listen in anything in simple 2.1. Even when playing back a simple mp3 file, I'm getting it split up through all my speakers. I need to actually change my audio card settings to 2 speakers to get 2 channel sound. That's not normal is it? Using the analog output, movies sound GREAT!

DVD Still not happy with standard dvd playback. The gamma seems a little out of whack. Blacks seem overly crushed. Colors get blotchy quit often. De-interlacing...what's the secret to this? If I select "enable hardware acceleration" in the cyberlink powerDVD settings, things look much, much worse. If I take my 8800 card out of the mix, then use the powerlink dvd to handle the de-interlacing, it looks better, but still not as good my old dvd player did. When I do a search in the Nvidia help file for de-interlacing I get nothing. ??? As I've said before, one of the major reasons, if not the biggest reason for building this HTPC was to get the very best standard def dvd picture possible. From all fronts, this is the one thing everybody in the htpc world seemed to agree on. Standard def DVD playback on a htpc is supposed to be better than just about any dvd player you can buy. Nvidia's "PureVideo" technology...is that all built into the card, or is there something else I'm supposed to be downloading/installing? Because thus far, the Nvidia card just plain sucks.

Blu-Ray I just watched "Casino Royale" on blu-ray last night, and just about pee'd myself. Now THAT is what I've been expecting. Sound and picture were just about as perfect as I could possibly hope for. I did have 2 or 3 moments of dropped frames/skipping during the movie. Frustrating. If I'm not mistaken though, the PowerDVD settings for last night's viewing still had "enable hardware acceleration" disabled. That means I was playing back blu-ray without the help of my video cards power. I'll have to do some comparisons with Blu-Ray with acceleration both on and off. But so far it seems all my movie playback issues stem from that stupid friggin' card. (or my complete lack of understanding how it's supposed to be setup)

misc
Did I mention that my cordless mouse has a range of about 3'? I need to sit on the floor in front of my tv to get everything set up. Bleck. A guy here a work has a differnt mouse that's getting about a 20' range. I guess it's time for a new mouse.

Overscan is still an pain in the butt. Nvidia says they may have a workaround with their next driver. We'll see.