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[staatsof]

So  I have:

Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H  MB with integrated ATI video and sound.
AMD Athlon 7750 Dual-Core
4 GB memory

55 GB SSD for the opsys. A network drive will hold the media library.

A Blue Ray/DVD/CD writer.

I've loaded WinDVD which works fine on DVDs and Blue Ray

I also have an IOGEAR Multimedia KYB  The MCE keys don't function of course.

I was originally planning to load Win 7 Pro-32 onto this because of the MCE compatibility but having tired out WinDVD with great success I'm wondering if I should just down load the JRiver software onto Vita and see how it performs as well?

The HTPC does not seem loaded at all. I ran the utility to measure latency and drop out. Everything seems fine.

I may want to record content from my cable company at some point if that doesn't turn out to be a hugely messy deal.

Or should I skip the Win Vista and move right to Win 7?

Any potential issues?

Thanks.

[InflatableMouse]

Unless you have a license for Vista and don't want to dish out some more for Windows 7 then yes, Vista will do just fine.

In any other case I would go for Windows 7.

IMHO, miles better than Windows Vista, although Vista has improved with all the updates after that terrible start, I still think 7 feels much faster, snappier and happier than Vista.

[jmone]

Vista will run MC well and give you access to newer items like WASAPI for high quality audio output.  That said, I too would put on Win7 or Win8.

[staatsof]

Thanks guys for the replies.  The Vista business has none of the MCE stuff and as this is my first HTPV experience I don't really know if that's a problem or what I'm missing because of this? I guess if I ever want a TV tuner this probably another reason to dump this version of Vista.  It was free 

Sounds like I might just as well put Windows 7 on there it's only money ...

Getting the sound sorted was a bit of a deal. So now the HDMI goes to the TV and the optical output goes to the home theater receiver which is an older one and has no HDMI.
That works except that there's no sound through the TV's sound system as you can't have both sound devices working at the same time. That's a bit annoying.

Is that a MB issue or is it fixed under Windows 7?

TV won't output a digital signal to the receiver for decoding. I think that's the whole idea right?

Thanks again

[InflatableMouse]

You don't need any of the MCE stuff, MC does it all and does it better, including TV Tuner stuff

Are you using MC18?

I think the latest betas include a feature to allow different outputs depending on the type of content being played.

I might be wrong though, I've been very busy and have not followed all the latest release info.

If that doesn't work then you need to use S/PDIF but you do realize that doesn't support all multichannel formats, most notably the higher samplerates (>96Khz) which are supported for 2 channel only. Some older receivers might not even support 24-bits over S/PDIF and simply strip the 4 extra bits.

I guess you could setup MC to decode your stuff to your channel setup (5.1?) and resample it to 24 bits/48 Khz. The annoying thing here is that if you have high samplerate audio that would get downsampled too.

There are probably better solutions though, this is what I could come up with for now .

[staatsof]

I'm getting ready to download MC and try it out  but before I do I wanted to ask about Vista (wo MCE extensions).

This copy of Vista was free and I don't intend to use the system for anything other than playing DVDs, Blue Ray, library of videos and a library of all my CDs.

So far I just tried a dvd/blue ray  software package to try everything out a bit. I am seeing some strange stuff but ask about that on another forum.

I just wanted to see if people think I should skip this freebie Vista and go to 7.

My receiver is a few years old so no HDMI at all on that one.

The audio from Blue Ray is being transcoded by my receiver as 5.1 Dolby surround.

Surprisingly the DVD-A is working as well via WINDVD transcoded as Dolby 5.1 surround according to the displays on my receiver. I'll have to compare this with how it plays on my older Panasonic CD/DVD player going through optical connection. That player does play DVD-A properly.

So are you using MC to record TV content  off of a cable system or?

Thanks for your reply.