New
#1
Choppy Live TV in Media Center
I have searched around for a solution to this problem but so far none I have read about match what I have seen so here goes:
I have my Dell Latitude D430 laptop as a dedicated media center, docked and connected to my 50" Plasma TV. 2Gb memory, internal drive is 120Gb and several external USB drives and an adaptec dual TV tuner (USB). Previously I had Windows XP Media Center 2005 and everything worked fine but I recently upgraded (fresh installed) all my computers at home with Windows 7 Home Ultimate (32 bit).
Now, I can't watch live TV or recorded TV shows in Windows Media Center. For the record (and before anyone asks), the "codec pack" I use is the built-in media codec for Media Center, nothing added, nothing changed. When I try to watch live TV or recorded TV shows in Media Center, it almost immediately gets very choppy and beyond annoying. The audio appears to play fine at the proper speed but with the video being choppy, it goes on without the video.
First I started off saying all worked fine on XP MCE 2005. Live TV, recorded TV, internet streams, DVD rips, everything. I can still record TV shows, they record just fine. Watching them in Media Center - choppy. That same recorded TV show I can open in Media Player on that same computer and it plays flawlessly. Playing DVDs, DVD rips, downloaded TV shows, internet-streamed movies and TV shows in media center work perfectly. I can plug up my USB TV tuner to my desktop machine and it runs live TV just fine, plays recorded TV just fine.
Once again, it is only Live TV and Recorded TV that is choppy and unwatchable in Windows 7 Media center and not Media Player. This is not a problem with time-shift (since recorded TV doesn't use time shift) and this is not a codec issue (as this is the built-in Media Center using the built-in Microsoft codecs). I have tried using the local hard drive for storing the recorded (and time-shift data) as well as an external USB drive - both have the same results.
Has anyone else seen this issue, and more importantly, has anyone found a fix for this issue? By the way when I installed Windows 7 fresh on this laptop, it installed perfectly - no errors, every piece of hardware was detected automatically and is natively supported without having to add a single device driver or hack in any old Windows drivers.