Skystar Video Slower on FASTER pc? Help!

harmio

Hey guys, I bought a Skystar 2 with help from everyone here, and was using it fine on my old 1.2 ghz 128mb ram on board graphic set up pc, I recently bought a 2.6ghz, 256mb ram, on board graphic pc, which i assumed would display the video better or at least the same. However, when using progdvb the video seems to be sluggish and at full screen is virtually unwatchable, with skipping sound also.

Does anyone have any idea how I could cure this or what the cause may be,m I have shut down all software, could this be something that i could fix?

Thanks guys!

prof

Hi Harmio,
Have you looked at advice given by BGona Stick in "Help for prog dvb" thread?

BGonaSTICK

The problem could be your on-board graphics. For some things they seem to work fine, but for apps that give the graphics and memory subsystems a real good pounding, they can prove troublesome. Most use main system memory, which is often slower than that on graphics cards, plus it reduces what's available for decoding the mpeg2 stream (done by Windows media player software decoder for SS2).

See if you can disable the on-board graphics in the BIOS, and add another graphics card. You may not have an AGP slot available, and PCI graphics cards are nowhere near as fast.

STICK

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s*t*a*r*m*a*n

im running a very fast system with 1 gig ram and no problems but im having an unusual thing happen. if i try to open the mpeg 2 file i have recorded by even putting the mouse over the file and clicking it once to light up the icon (not even exucuting the mpeg 2 file which would require me to double click on it) then i get a windows explorer crash. happens every time i do it, even a reboot does not help. Only way i have found to copy or delete the file without any instability is to boot up nero burning software and click on the file that way, any ideas what the problem may be?

in reply to harmios problem, you really should consider an agp graphics card in your setup, assuming you have an agp slot, this will take some of the processing power away from the cpu as the skystar 2 is a very hungry card when using up the processor BUT it should work with your setup anyway i think with or without an agp graphics card so it could be the ram is just a little bit lacking. Progdvb needs lots of power to run properly though on encrypted channels but runs perfectly smooth on free to air on a pentium 3 450mhz with 640 megs of ram, a cheap agp graphics card would give you more cpu resources and perhaps another 256megs of ram would help. So you could try another slot of ram first i guess, Only so much ram though will make any difference, after that the performance benefits are negligible.

Saying that though if you where getting good results before then you should be getting better results now, that makes me think that perhaps the bios is not set right or something on the motherboard, is everything else working ok?

BGonaSTICK

Does it happen with any other file type?

Have you tried deleting and re-adding the file type in the registry (if it's only that file type causing the problems)?

Does it happen when you right-click it? Can you re-name it (including the filename suffix) this way? Does it cause a problem when it's renamed?

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damhy

Just thought i would say here that I have problems with most programs playing back the captured mpeg files, they seem to play at half rate, i appear to have got round this by using PVAStrumento (http://www.offeryn.de/dv.htm) to demultiplex the file, which it also corrects the frames at the start of the file.

Then I use TMPGEnc (ftp://ftp.ku.lt/pub/Windows/audio/K-...mpgenc2521.exe), quit the wizard, go to file MPEG Tools, simple multiplex, put the demultiplexed files back together and it then appears to play fine.

This may or may not help but it seems to work for me, though I dont get this problem with the Power DVD codecs, its just i prefer nvidia since it makes it easier to configure my graphics card.

Just on a techi kind of note here not that many people care, if you know about mpeg then I suspect this is what cases the frames to be corrupt, just wondered if anyone will agree with what I think it is: You have the IPB frames, when you make an mpeg file obviously the file will start with a Key Frame(I) but since you grab off the satellite from whenever you click record it might start with some P or B frames which of course means that it cannot construct the picture at the start of the file, until the next keyframe. Well thats what I think it might be anyway.

BGonaSTICK

That's an interesting point, though I haven't found any of my recordings to start with anything other than an I frame. Never had any problem using PowerDVD V5.0 either. Always plays my files faultlessley, unlike WMP.

I also get perfect results using PVAStrumento with files recorded from ProgDVB and MyTheatre V2.76, but do get multiple problems when editing split (and unsplit come to think of it) .ts files from my Dreambox.

I'm just a noob in this regard though!

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s*t*a*r*m*a*n

thanks for the link damhy I will check out the software you recommend. I never thought of using the tools function on tmpgenc though i am aware of it. its a nice piece of software. Just trying out xp and see if that can get any better results for me, thanks for the input guys. You never said though if you got an explorer crash just by touching the mpeg file? i was wondering if this was a common occcurence or just me.

damhy

If you are getting a system crash when clicking the file in explorer then it is likely to be related to a few different things. The main point being that when you click the file, it tries to read it to create the thumbnail in the file summary. Hence its sothing todo with the combination of graphics card, direct and/or your mpeg2 codecs.

The most likely scenario I would have throught is that its your graphics card is not fully direct X complient. I had the same problem with a laptop of mine, whenever I played video it would bluescreen and restart, cant remember the exact error but I think it was related to some memory error.

Since you say that you are using an onboard graphics, you are likely to have similar problems, often you can change the amount of shared memory being used in the bios, crank this up if its set to something low. Next up you may want to install the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard. If you know what it is then it should be easy to find the most common are going to be intel (www.intel.co.uk), via (www.viaarena.com these are the hyperon drivers) or sis (www.sis.com). Download them move them to a universally accessible part of the hard disk if using NT/2k/XP then reboot, hold down F8 so that you get the startup options, select safemode. When windows loads make sure that you log in as administrator, and then install the chipset drivers.

Sometimes you can be amazed at the difference that they make to the system performance.

As I said its most liekly something to do with the graphics, I may be wrong but as a last resort you could buy some cheap nvidia fx5200 card, they are only about £30-40 for a cheap one, or even an ati radeon with DDR memory. No guarentees but it should be infinately better performance than onboard graphics.

Damien

s*t*a*r*m*a*n

Hi damhy.

it was harmio that was using onboard graphics not me, i am using an agp card and a very good one at that. Only thing i can say on direct x though is i was running a game on it other night and it seemed juttery but opengl worked excellent.im not sure about the direct x thing as pretty much everything runs a dream on it. The motherboard is by gigabyte and i havent updated the motherboard drivers just used the ones that came with the board so i guess thats an option but im more inclined to think its a codec issue. I think maybe the progdvb codec in some way is being used by the operating system which would be one reason why i cannot delete the files. Im not sure if that is the case but i think it may be because of the way it crashed when clicked on.