How to achieve perfectly smooth playback of HD content

Ok, the media center journey continues. HD content looks great on a big setup right? I love it, good to show off to the friends & neighbours ;-)  However, not all setup are right for playing back completely smooth HD content, regardless of how powerful the htpc is.

if you put a bog standard blu ray player, all will look well and life is good. However, once you get into archiving (that's another days work) & library playback of blu ray & other HD content, to the trained eye, all is not always well.

Most TV's now are 100hz + the higher the better, that's not the problem tho. Our trusty graphic cards only output at 50 or 60hz, still looks goods when played thru the HDTV... where the problem occurs is that all movies are between 23 to 24 fps, so this is the 50/24 bug you may of seen talked about on the forums, and I'm only getting my hear around it now. basically the movie playback rate of 23 to 24 fps conflicts with 50 or 60 hz on the graphic card, the result of this is ever now & again, you will see a slight stutter in the picture when watching a movie, ever so slight, but it bugs the hell out of me!

Once I started archiving the blurays this became a real issue for me because I wanted to achieve 100% perfect HD audio & video playback on the HTPC, and I was running into this bug, so my HTPC would not playback a blu ray as "good" as standard blu ray players.

To prove & get a better understanding of the issue, open your graphic card and set the refresh rate to 24hz, windows will now look & feel slow & ugly, then play back a film you know well. you will notice its "smoother"

Leaving the HTPC constantly at 24hz is a no-no because it looks shit, so I have to find a solution for this.

Fr media center, if you are planning archiving all you're movies & using mymovies.dk plugin, which most do, the ONLY solution to this issue is to use TMT5. If you use TMT5 then you Blu Rays have to be in .iso format, which brings up other issues, and there is NO FIX for any of the other .mkv content you have.

However, XBMC to the rescue.

XBMC has the option to sync the display to the refresh rate of the movie you are watching. And there is no beta releases of XBMC EDEN that can handle HD Audio codecs (some not all afaik) - so the long term is in the works...

I was a little bummed by this as I was hoping to use W7MC as my complete solution, but I was never going to scrap XBMC anyway.

So - in summary,

- if you want glitch free playback of your BluRay (.iso) use TMT5 in W7MC
- if you want glitch free playback of your BluRay & all other HD mkv's - use XBMC EDEN

Upgrade time...

Hello All, long time no update! Ok, so have gone thru a fairly big update with the HTPC. I scrapped the USB DVBS2 tuner, all sorts of issues with it not coming out of sleep... so, I bought more internal tuners, heres what I have now:

2 * Hauppauge 229 WinTV NOVA-HD-S2
1 * Hauppauge 1342 WinTV-HVR-4400 TV Tuner PCIe

So,  at the moment I have 5 tuners, 4 dedicated to $ky sub & FreeSat, 3 of which can handle the HD channels, the 4th tuner is from the dreambox, so a extra tuner for all freesat and SD $ly sub. Not really using the dreambox tuner, but have it connected to the dish 24/7 regardless.

I'm still running cccam CCcam_2.1.2 & newCS1.67, too lazy to update the dreambox as its working ok...however my entitlements are not auto-updating to I have to pop the sky card back into my sky box once every 2 months or so to update the entitlements. cccam 2.1.4 will fix thsi for me if i ever get around to installing it...

I also have a 5th DVBT tuner which is included in the 4400 tuner, so in the process of getting that cabled up so I can get RTE2 HD! better get my act in gear for the world cup...

I have finally sorted out the LCD screen on my Antec case, i was missing one of these:

http://store.antec.com/Product/accessory-spare_parts/24p-3p-power-adapter-extension/0-761345-71017-6.aspx

From the dodgy pic above, you can now see the case is operating as expected. to be honest I done use any of the IR functions as I dont really need them, all control is handled via the microsoft IR kit.

Installed a Blu-Ray drive in there as well, about time I started ripping my Blu-Ray collection. I;m using a combination of AnyDVD HD (to handle the decryption) and DVDFab for ripping. Demuxing to .mkv with full retention of video & audio bit rate quality, just dropping the audio channels I dont need. I've double checked thsi with mediainfo, and the bit rate of the video on the bd disc .m2ts is identical to the .mkv I'm getting from DVDFab demux

DOwngraded gthr graphci card to NVIdia 9500GT which I had in another box, as I was havign fan issues with the 9800GT. This is a temporary fix, as i have ordered a new GPU card which wil allow me to bit-stream HD Audio over HDMI!

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5570 1GB GDDR3 PCI-E Graphics Card

good read here on Bit-stream HD audio:

http://www.missingremote.com/guide/bitstreaming-hdmi-hd-audio-formats-your-htpc

I've also put a good bit of work into figurig otu the codecs, properly, so everything will stream to the xbox extenders via mymovies add-in and DTS (soon HD) audio in main room. I'll keep this for a separate blog post.

Channel change speed demo...

heres a demo of the acamd plugin in action. As you can see it takes no longer than 4 secs between HD channels. not bad. This was recorded while there was a x360 extender in use in another room also viewing a premium channel...

Beginning of the end?

SKY FIRST REAL ATTACK against CS !!?

http://www.satellites.co.uk/forums/dreambox-support-forum/190307-sky-first-real-attack-against-cs.html

Seems that has been some change on transponder 12.480, and can now no longer decode C4 & C4+1......uh oh!

Recording 3 channels.....

As the title says... I have no more room in my chassis for pci / pcie tunes, so I picked up a usb2 DVBS H2 card, for 50 euros, not bad i thought...

HD Star USB DVB-S2 HD Tuner

I'm reading some mixed results in the TV source forum, what the heck, for that proce I'll give ti a go. So far, so good. Successfully recording 2 HD channels and one other SD channel now from my 3 tuner sources.

Bye Bye HDPVR ;-(

Ok, long time no update.

My media center has been going thru soem major changes to date. DVBlink + HDPVR is a sweet setup for piping sky HD into W7MC, but only having 1 tuner as always a touchy subject.

I originally convinced myself the the sacrifice was worth it, but no longer!

So, I have now go ne down the route of DVBLink TV Source & 2* DVBS cards & Dreambox to decode encryption.

This method will use my sky subscription, and give me my Dual tuners (up to 6 possible...) which enables tre multiroom functionality with ONE SKY SUBSCRIPTION

I have this fully up & running now using my SKy SD subscription card, waiting to purchase the 2nd DVBS HD card, and the setup will be upgraded to se my SKy HD sub card, once this is operational, I'll cancel my 2nd sky subscription as it will nto be needed.

The full setup on how to do this was covered in last 2 posts, most difficult part was getting the boxkey right.

So at the moment,I have the 1 sky card feeding 4 rooms (dual tuner for now) via HTPC & x360 media extenders.