Media Center Messing Up Hi-Def TV.

[Seggons]

Hi,


I've recently brought a BGT3620 TV Card and I've been experiencing an issue when viewing HD channels which I cannot work out. But before I continue I'd like to list down a few specs before I continue.


Computer:


Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GB (2x4GB)
Graphics: Nvidia 8800GTS
Sound: Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition linked to 2.1 speaker set-up
PSU: XFX 650W XXX Modular Edition
Hard Drives: 1x 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD With Windows 7 and 1x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 For Data
TV Card: BGT3620
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Edition
Main Monitor: LG Flatron W2363D 3D Ready running at 1920x1080 @ 120Hz
2nd Monitor: Dell Something running at 1280x1024 @70Hz
Windows is fully up to date patch wise and has all the latest drivers for all hardware applied.


Location: Bedfordshire
Transmitter: Sandy Heath which has been through the digital switch-over.
Distance away by road: 6.4 miles
Can the transmitter be seen from the house: Yes


To save me trying to explain my issue and possibly confusing you along the way I've made a video so you can physically see the issue yourself.


YouTube - HD Channel Problems


As you can see from the video I start off at BBC One HD and you can clearly see the stuttering picture which doesn't clear up if I leave it. Then as I move channel it seems to keep some of the previous picture as well as a pixelated picture of the channel I'm on and so on. Strangely through the BBC Preview which is the last of the HD channels worked fine at the time. I just tried it again but with live golf on this time and I get the same problem as the other channels.


Just to prove that it isn't just a weak signal I move onto some non-HD channels and they work perfectly.


Things that I've tried. To me that showed all the symptoms of a low signal. I run a little indoor aerial seeing as I can see the transmitter. (Buy Non Amplified Total Control Indoor Freeview TV Aerial at Argos.co.uk - Your Online Shop for Television aerials and boosters.) So I went out a brought a plug in signal booster which boosts the signal up to 20dB. Tried that and if anything it just made the picture even worse then what it was. I then tried a utility called Vista/7 Media Center Decoder Utility to changed the media decoder in case it was that. But the few video codecs I had to choose from just brought up a decoder error in the media center.


So as a last resort I went out today and brought 6 Meters of aerial cable so I could plug into the house aerial socket. That feeds to a proper big aerial which is located in our loft. That video above was taken with the loft aerial connected and it has made zero difference. So now I've hit a brick wall because I have run out of ideas. I'd like to think I've ruled out low signal as a cause. I believe my computer is beefy enough to watch Hi Def TV. So I don't know if it's a bug with the cards hardware, the drivers for the card or weather it's Microsoft’s Media Player being funny. I did try spending a few hours trying different TV viewing apps. But seeing as there is only 2 products on the market that pick-up DVB-T2 it's hardly surprising that they all failed to pick up the Hi Def channels.


Edit: I've just found a trial app that does pick up the HD channels and they display and work fine. So I'm lead to believe that it's some kind of software issue.


If you have got this far then thank a lot for reading and I hope you can help.

 

[MrNeeds]

have you updated to the latest drivers? http://home.btconnect.com/blackgold/Downloads/BGT_8.1.0.0.zip

 

[Seggons]

With some help from a couple of guys off the overclockers forum we managed to find out what was causing it. It's something in the Nvidia drivers, if you want to find out more about it have a browse of this thread. BGT3620 HD Freeview issue. - Overclockers UK Forums I've sent a message to Nvidia's technical support and they told me to file a bug report which I have done. So I'm just holding tight to see weather Nvidia will take any action or not.

 

[MrNeeds]

Maybe you could post a request to nvidia, I'd be pretty annoyed if I found out that the drivers were the problem, oh btw, there's a new driver out, 275.33 WHQL

 

[Seggons]

That's what I've done but weather they can produce the problem their end is another thing. Thanks for the heads up about the new driver. I'm going to give it a shot but considering the bug appeared in drivers made last year and the bug is still in the last 2 recent ones I'm not holding up much hope.

 

[MrNeeds]

http://uk.download.nvidia.com/Windows/275.33/275.33-Win7-WinVista-Desktop-Release-Notes.pdf that's the release notes, maybe have a quick look through that and see if it mentions HDTV cards in there

edit, i found this in the "yet to be resolved" section.

"GeForce 8 Series GPUs
HD resolutions higher than 720p are not available.[308627]"
so at least they've acqknowledged the issue

 

[Seggons]

Heh thanks for that. After a quick Google it looks like they Acknowledged it back in 2008 so there goes all my hope of seeing it fixed.

 

[MrNeeds]

Heh thanks for that. After a quick Google it looks like they Acknowledged it back in 2008 so there goes all my hope of seeing it fixed.

i suppose you could always get an upto date graphics card, doesnt need to be a powerful card, something like a 220 geforce, theyre quite cheap and will handle what you need it to do :|

 

[Seggons]

Another new problem has come up. I'm unable to update to any of the latest drivers for love nor money. I can install everything apart from the graphics driver itself. It just constantly fails. Even if I remove everything Nvidia related, go to the Device Manager and point windows to it the driver still fails. Time to report that to Nvidia to see what they say.