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[globetrotters1]

I researched everything available on the MC market these days and bought MC12, that says a lot about my opinion... keep up the good work!

To make my question a bit clear I have to start with my media center setup and post the questions after that:

Since some years I run an ELAN HDC2000 whole-house music system with different zones. In most zones there are ELAN VIA64 touchpanels installed (which work over NTSC standard video and a special network connection - I have the experience and the technical means to program them to the special system situation - all external commands are IR commands which will be generated by the touchpanels). Until now I used a off-the-shelve music server, based on the Imerge unit (a horrible and very restrictive solution, nothing to recommend). All the rest are details which are not of importance here for now.

Out of cost reasons I don't want to replace a lot of hardware, but I built a new computer as a music and media server. The setup is pretty straight-forward:

ASUS Crosshair motherboard with HD-sound-daughtercard, AM2 processor, some memory
A lot of hard disks (6)
A Matrox Parhelia APVe graphics PCIe-16 card with TV-out
A TV tuner card Hauppauge PVR-350

Questions:

1. does anyone know how I can make the TV-out of the Matrox card work with the GUI of the media center (which is 640x480 or just NTSC)? where can I activate that the theater view is automatically routed over video out? do I have to use a special driver? where I can get that from? every hint appreciated!

right now I use the Matrox Parhelia APVe driver with clone mode and the main screen with 800x600 resolution (which is not the sense of the whole setup), but it's the only way I could see the PC desktop on the TV monitor... there must be another easier way but I couldn't find it

2. I want to write a special theater view skin for the ELAN touchpanels. The only restriction is that the touch-keys always have to be at the same spot. Therefore I want to put a row of buttons side by side horizontally onto the lower picture edge, so that the rest of the picture can be used for the album informations. After studying the theater view SDK it seems impossible to change the font size to a bigger font suitable for TV-out, is that correct? Or can someone help to change to such a better readable font? (of course I will finally make all these informations available for all people who want to use such an ELAN setup with MC12)

3. as soon as I switch in theater view to the Hauppauge TV tuner, the system crashes some seconds later! who knows something about incompatibilities with this setup? The crash information is: AppName: media center 12.exe, AppVer: 12.0.164.0, ModName: ole32.dll, ModVer: 5.1.2600.2846, Offset: 0004eaa6 - media center has to be closed - but the normal WinTV2000 programm (delivered with the Hauppauge PVR card) works without flaws

4. some cracking in the sound output seem to point to driver problems. Did anyone else encounter such problems? Especially they are obvious from the moment on when I use the built in sound equalizer

Thanks for all help, hints or remarks
Martin
(globetrotters1)

[globetrotters1]

Is there really NO ONE who can help?

Not even people from JRiver ?

In the meantime I could eliminate the crackling sound by installing an Audigy 2 ZS sound card. Now the sound is just superb!

My most urgent problem is the theater view output of Media Center 12 on the TV-out connection of the graphics adapter... who knows how to activate that?

Thanks

[JimH]

Your crash with the Hauppauge card is probably a hardware driver problem.  A google search might help.  The HTPC forum at AVSForum.com might also help.

Theater View uses 3d graphics and some video cards may not support it.  Updating DirectX from Microsoft might help.

Whether TheaterView can be displayed on TV-out is up to Windows and the driver.  It should be just another monitor to MC.

[globetrotters1]

Jim,

thanks for the hints! appreciate it

re 1: I use the latest drivers, but I'll try the others of Hauppauge, probably one of the others will work better

re 2/3: DirectX is the latest version, all updates done; the problem seems to be that the Matrox drivers don't create another monitor for TV-out, it just seems to realize that there is video from a tuner or such and the Matrox driver creates a little window on the main screen with the video contents and activates the TV-out connection = works just perfect with any video stream (like created from WinDVD or from the Hauppauge tuner driver); I have not much of an idea if this needs use of certain drivers with your theater view output to initiate this switching process... right now I do it with "clone the contents of the main screen onto the TV-out" which obviously makes not much sense as I use a 1600x1200 TFT monitor and the reduction to NTSC makes everything nice and colorful, but unreadable

[globetrotters1]

Jim,

I found out that your program in Theater View has to use "DirectX Media" or an "ActiveMovie" function, so that it works properly.

Could you check with someone if you use that function in DirectX?

Would appreciate it!

Thanks