MyHD MDP-130 - Page 218

Read the Meta FAQ to find MIT's roadmap. Bottom line: Don't wait for a "140".

Where do I find the META FAQ?

Click where it says "Home Theater Computers" at the top or bottom of this page.

So I posted a while back about problems with the myHD MDP-130 card and the Syntax Olevia LT32HV. It's been quite a while and my wife and I had a baby limiting my time to mess around with this stuff, but I wanted to provide some feedback to the AVS community

So after much troubleshooting, I ordered a VGA to component cable from digital connections, and I have been running component to the LT32HV since. I am running at fixed 1280 X 720p resolutions. I have noticed that the LT32HV does have some detection problems. Some modes seem to be detected as either 720p or 1080i no matter what I have selected for MyHD output resolution.

I also tried several other PCs with the VGA input and I can say that there is something wrong with the VGA input. It once again seems to be an issue where the display will not detect some supposedly supported resolutions and tries to force everything to 1024 by 768 or 1280X720. I am not using the VGA input as a result. Also I contacted Syntax customer support by e-mail and never received anything from them. If I get some time in the next few months, I want to call and harass them about this issue.

Note that my graphics card for the PC is running over DVI and I haven't had any problems with that, however I just run it in 720p which appears to work best for the LT32HV display. The native resolution is 1366 X 768 but my video card does not support this resolution. I haven't got any inputs to detect this resolution, which is a little disappointing but not a deal killer.

So the problem I was having is with the display, not the myHD card it appears. I got it working over component and I am happy so far.

I added a 300GB USB drive to record shows to, and everything is working quite well overall. Picture is great and as long as I have signal, I haven't had any problems with the recording features. The MDP-130 does what it claims and works great on my HTPC despite my paltry hardware specs (900MHz AMD Athlon processor, 512MB single stick of RAM). I have even tried beating the system up by using Winamp to playback music and render a 1024X1024 visualization while recording with the MDP-130. While the visualization frame rate was pathetic, the audio never dropped out and the show I recorded did fine. Excellent!

I use the TitanTV interface to schedule shows, and this works great. Only problem I have had is with the syndicated Simpsons shows that start 5 min. before the advertised time, but that can be corrected manually now that I know about it. Seems like the station is messing with the DVR crowd.

I had some problems earlier with the time shifting, but since I added the new drive and cleared up some other space, I haven't had any problems with this feature. Great feature BTW if you have a baby. I can respond to my babies needs immediately and resume what I was watching when I can.

There are a few areas where I feel the software could be refined (I am running 1.66E):

1. Skip forward/skip back works, but it would be nice to also have the 2X,4X,8X, etc style forward and reverse like a DVD player. That makes it a lot easier to skip through commercials. I get around this somewhat by using HDTVtoMPEG to remove commercials, particularly for movies.
2. Instead of scrolling through all of the playback files, it would be nice to have an OSD window where you could select the file you want to play instead of having to skip through all the files.
3. Hibernate/Standby - I would like to be able to let my PC go into a low power state and wake up to record. Standby seems to work best but it isn't really that much lower power. Hibernate works sometimes but sometime the PC does not go into Hibernate. I am not sure why and I have just started to play around with this stuff. As of yet I haven't been there to witness what happens.
4. Recently I have been getting some crashes of the myHD app when I am navigating playback files. This just started and I haven't quite figured out what the issue is. This could be a Win XP issue as well.
5. Sometimes when skipping around streams, the audio drops out. Most of the time skipping again restores the audio (if not I have found it is generally a problem with the file itself, usually because of a signal drop out.) However the audio does not return sometimes and I have to either skip around the file or worse case, skip back to the begining of the file.

Overall I would say the MDP-130 is a steal for $200 given it's functionality. I am happy with what the card does and it's performance. Thanks to everyone out there that responded to my earlier requests for help.

It's too bad there isn't a MDP-140 on the horizon (MCE compliant?) and some software updates.

Fire--

1. The numeric keys on the remote already do this. RTFM. (Oh, I missed the "like a DVD" phrase--no can do, as GSR says below)
2. There is an OSD window to select the file to play: Press FAV while in File mode. (If you meant that you want to navigate to an arbitrary file on HDD, see AllenDB's PlaylistManager thread for a workaround)
3. Not a MyHD problem. It works with both S3 and S4 sleep on many, many PCs.
4. Use System Restore to undo whatever you installed that's causing the crashing.
5. This is likely a soundcard driver issue.

P.S.: Where were you yesterday? There was a guy around here who was looking for a god.

I also had issues at one time with hibernation/standby thru MyHD. The configuration that works for me is just having MyHD close between and after all captures, IOW, MyHD does not do any hibernating. My hibernation is set thru XPs' power settings to hibernate after 15 minutes so the OS takes care of it.

Have had no problems since using this setup.

Yes, letting Power Options send the PC to sleep is the preferred method whenever there is more than one type of scheduled task going on. Otherwise, you'll find that one or another of the tasks is trying to force a sleep during some other active job.

Once I went to a two card set up, Fusion and MYHD, Power Options was the only way to go.

FYI, Allen's XML guide based Record This which schedules on both cards to reduce conflicts is really coming along. It makes buying a second card (Fusion) really worth the dollars.

!!! If this translates to what I think it does, you are my new best friend. Gee, and I did not expect to learn anything today.

TPM

Terry, I think Fire is looking for fast playback (ie: you see the picture moving faster than normal), not various skip ahead options. Fast playback like I think he's asking for can't be done due to hardware limitations which apply all the hardware decoder cards AFAIK. I seem to remember Cliff mentioning that the MyHD guys had gotten something like 2X play working but not very well and anything faster was hopeless.

What does IIRC mean?

What does AFAICR mean?

Thanks!

IIRC: If I remember correctly

AFAICR: As far as I can remember

Isn't It Really Cool that we can look up acronyms? But I think the rank makes more sense even if it isn't cool

Several months ago, I hinted that there was some serious interest in doing something about the relatively anemic EPG within MyHD that's hobbled by the broadcasters' PSIP data. Now you can finally take a look for yourself and see what our volunteer developer team has wrought.

Anybody try this yet?

Yeah, and I've already found a(nother) bug.

Gee, this looks like bait, it smells bait, therefore I smell a trap

Please, please don't take the bait, if that's what it is. Just keep figuring things out and improving the meta faq!

As to the jar file, you should be able to double click it. If not, go to http://java.sun.com/getjava and install it. Or, since peecees are not your gig, you could save the mcl file to your linux machine then type 'java -jar ChannelOrg.jar'. Actually, you could try that on the peecee too, if your jar wasn't associated with java (double clicking didn't work).

--Dale--

Is there anyway to use a soundcard other then the default-device? I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but maybe there's a regisrtry hack, or third part utility? For analog, I can use the line-out on myHd to physically connenct anywhere but digital audio is lost. Anyone know if it's possible to hijack a spdif signal form the daughtercard connector?

Thanks for the tips. I will look into these.

I am only the god of Fire though,

Yeah I think I missed this one because I have a programmed universal remote for all of my electronics. I programmed the remote a while ago and I haven't been using the nyHD remote. The programable remote doesn't have a FAV button pre say, but I have it mapped to something. I have to check this out.

The myHD card has a coax digital out that you can enable. I can't remember if you can enable both a soundcard output and the coax output at the same time, but I have used both methods with SPDIF output, although I only have one stereo so I haven't tried them at the same time.

I don't understand what your issue is. What are you trying to do? Are you saying that your soundcard or the MDP's S/PDIF connector is broken?? Please explain further.

I have a MDP-130 aswell as an a ATI TV Wonder Elite/HDTV Wonder combo with MMC (will be switching to SageTV or BTV at some point). I have onboard audio and a Montego DDL PCI soundcard (which might be getting the boot, but that's OT). What I would like to do is have two independent sets of outputs for each setup (video, analog audio and spdif) so I can have two A/V zones running simultaneously. The only hurdle is downmixing AC3 to analog stereo from both setups at the same time. Most I the time I listen to downmixed stereo via the speakers on my display so this is a problem; both the MyHD and MMC are using the systems default audio device. This could be solved if I could jumper both analog audio and spdif from the MyHD card to the non-default audio card, or somehow change which soundcard is used for AC3 downmixing.

Why does the audio DSP have to be in the PC? If you used the MDP's S/PDIF output to an external DSP you could avoid the audio collision with the ATI, I think. (You also could probably use a soundcard with an S/PDIF input, if there's some answer to my first question, but I don't understand the need to go that route)

Using my receiver was plan b, but I'd prefer not to turn it on just for a stereo downmix to the crap speakers on my display, it will also require more cabling. Really it's not that big of a deal doing so, just thought since I've got onboard audio that's capable and just inches away why not use it.

I have not watched any further DVD's on the computer since we straightened this out, and I do not use the HTPC to listen to CDs so I cannot comment on that. However, everything is running smoothly since the change.

Sarc

Thanks, I'll go and do just that.

I received TTRider's message today out of the clear blue (MyHD refuses to start), and found these entries here. When I removed both files MyHD complained that I needed to re-install. Instead of doing that I retrieved the backup.mdb from the Recycle Bin, re-named it to epg.mdb, and now all is well.

Just a point of interest--it's fixed I think!

Thanks, Laserfan. I nominate this tip for the Meta FAQ (shortened to just deleting epg.mdb and renaming the backup file, of course ). The backup file is supposed to be used whenever there turns out to be corruption in epg.mdb--so I'd assumed that both were bad when the error message occurred. Obviously, that's wrong so it's worthwhile to try a manual swap.

BTW, another approach that one can take is to make a precautionary copy of an existing, functioning epg.mdb now, ready to swap back into place when this error occurs later.