eHome Problems - any advice?

[snoop244]

Originally posted by edmc

Big warning: The eHome driver will CRASH WinXP.

What do you mean by this? I've had e-homes working perfectly in 3 different XP machines with Hauppauge cards without a crash.

I agree with the frustrations caused at install. Like you, I just pointed the XP Hardware Install wizard at the Hauppauge files. Worked like a charm. Strangely, I also had the opposite problem: my e-home got recognized by XP as a Hauppauge card when I used the wizard without intervening.

Besides the registry problem (which DID, by the way, get re-introduced in my upgrade to the release version) the only real issue I had with the e-home was that I had to add it into Sage first, before the Hauppauge card, or I would get static when tuning the e-home. I'm not talking about the order it is added to XP, but, rather, the order it is added through the Sage setup wizard. I can't for the life of me figure out why. It could be some wierdness with my setup (though I'm pretty sure this happened on my two test machines as well).

I'm still interested in hearing how the Theater 200 could ever figure into a tv capture setup (even ATI's mmc)??? According to the ATI site, the Theater 200 can even decode HD. I understand how a decoder works on a card that actually has a physical video-out on it, but the e-home does not.

S.

[justme]

Sounds like we may want to have some driver hacking done. Then again the process of pointing Window's HW wizard is easy enough.

OK, I know I've already asked if the eHome can support imbedded CC like the PVR250, but now thanks to this driver issues I've also got another question...

Does anyone(snoop244?) here have more than 1 eHome in a single machine?
If yes is Sage properly regonizing them both, without any issues?
I suspect due to what we just learned about the drivers mixing a FM eHome with a nonFM might not work, but who knows. I'm so stuck right now as to which card to get. They break out into three price ranges:
~ $70 AverMedia M150(I have 1 already no CC yet) and ATI eHome (CC unknown)
~ $90 Roslyn card (CC unknowon)
~ $110 Hauppauge PVR250(I have one type 15 and a PVR 350 already) CC is working with both as long as driver is late 1.7.X or later.

[snoop244]

Originally posted by justme
Sounds like we may want to have some driver hacking done. Then again the process of pointing Window's HW wizard is easy enough.

OK, I know I've already asked if the eHome can support imbedded CC like the PVR250, but now thanks to this driver issues I've also got another question...

Does anyone(snoop244?) here have more than 1 eHome in a single machine?
If yes is Sage properly regonizing them both, without any issues?
I suspect due to what we just learned about the drivers mixing a FM eHome with a nonFM might not work, but who knows. I'm so stuck right now as to which card to get. They break out into three price ranges:
~ $70 AverMedia M150(I have 1 already no CC yet) and ATI eHome (CC unknown)
~ $90 Roslyn card (CC unknowon)
~ $110 Hauppauge PVR250(I have one type 15 and a PVR 350 already) CC is working with both as long as driver is late 1.7.X or later.

Not sure about the need for driver hacking. I personally do not have 2 e-homes working in a single machine. I haven't tried in some time. I will try again.

wrt CC. I built a Sage system for a hearing-impaired family member on the weekend. I assumed CC would just work. Wrong. I have read the threads on CC in Sage with the 250. I couldn't find the registry entry, so I stopped there. Also, that thread suggests it will not work on live tv. That's a problem.

wrt CC on the e-home, I believe CC is a requirement for Windows MCE certification. The e-home is an MCE card, therefore, I would guess it works, but I don't know for sure. I would happily test it if someone could help me understand the thread on CC in Sage using the Hauppauge. Again, I did a search for that registry entry and found nothing? Was there a typo in the registry entry name in that thread causing my search for the key to come up empty? This is on a machine with a 250 installed.

I would try CC with my 250pvr first, to make sure it works, and then try it with the e-home. I can also test the e-home under MCE to ensure the card itself is capable.

S.

[justme]

I've done some captures using CC on my PVR250. Here's a direct link for the PVR250 Reg on SHS's site. After you flip the Reg key you must reboot. You can then record a show you know has CC(check with a real TV). You only need a small segment, but I've found it's best to start during the show with CC, not commercials. Make sure the recording is done using one of the DVD profiles(DVD/DVDLong/DVDXlong)

After that simply run the mpg2srt tool on that mpg. It will generate a srt and sami file for the show. The easiest way to playback the file is to use WMP, I've also use Zoomplayer but lets keep it simple right now. WMP will automically load the VSfilter and voila, you have CC. Using WMP you'll also see another set below the video since WMP has native suppport for SAMI.Note:The generated srt files must stay in the same dir as the MPEG2, for CC playback to work. Also the srt files must have the same name as the mpeg, but mpg2srt already defaults to using the mpeg's name for the generated srt/sami files. So this shouldn't be an issue. However if you move/rename the Mpeg2 you must do the same for the corresponding srt file for successfull CC playback.

As for Sage I'm still new to that area. Right now you need all the video filters/renders set to default for the VSfilter to be able to insert itself in the graph. There are some potential ways around this, one invloves wrapping the VSfilter and the desired decoder togther and then adding it manually to Sage's list of decoders. This is way beyond my skills. The way I'm more interested in is parsing the srt file and then using Studio to dislpay it over the Video like an OSD item. This way Studio does the job of VSfilter and we are free to use nondefault renders/decoders. Please don't ask me more about Studio I'm not allowed to say. Besides I'm not that skilled with it anyway. I'm mainly trying to build support for CC amongst those more skilled and Jeff himself.


PS:I forgot you need to have the VSfilter installed on your system. May need to reboot after installing it, for it to work, I don't know. I already had it on mine since I watch soo much over seas anime. If you need a link to the VSfilter I can dig one up. I've attached the mpg2srt created by merrypig at the BTV forums

PPS:You must have one of the later 1.7 version and up of the PVR250 drivers to use the CC reg key. Version 1.6 will not work and some earlier 1.7s don't ether. And yes, you're correct this won't work with live TV since the mpeg must be processed by mpg2srt and the mpeg2 recording must be finished for mpg2srt to properly work. But this is not an issue for me since I don't watch live TV. Only shows that have already been recorded. I sometimes watch shows that are still recording, and there would be no CC for these(using current VSfilter method) but if I really want CC... I just wait til it done recording and watch. On my system(AMD XP 2100+) mpg2srt can process a mpeg at about 1.5 seconds per minutes of recording. So an hour recording only takes ~90 seconds.

Big thanks for trying this out.

/justme

[snoop244]

As expected, CC works under MCE on an e-home wonder. I will try it under sage when I have a spare minute.

S.

[justme]

I can't wait to find out about the eHome and CC on SageTV recordings. Big thanks for the info on eHome CC on MCE. That's really good news for me.

Since the eHome, which meets the MCE spec., has CC then the AverMedia M150(which I have one of) should work as well. The only question is how they are storing the CC data. If they use the same trick of putting it in the mpeg2 GOP, as Hauppauge does(in WinTV2000) then mpg2srt should work on the M150/eHome as well. I just need to ensure the M150 turns it on for nonMCE systems and that the M150 recording is done in a proper DVD profile. I hope hope the MCE cards aren't storing the CC data in that wierd wrapper that MCE puts around the standard MPEG2 files. I know the wrapper is used for copyright(DRM) and some metadata storage, I just hope they don't use it for CC too. As that would make it much harder to get CC on a nonMCE system. Oh, well time will tell.

Even if they use a different method than Hauppauge does, odds are that all MCE cards use the same trick for CC. So if we figure that out we can then get CC, for all of the MCE cards. ie ATI eHome, AverMedia M150, Hauppauge Roslyn, etc. This would be great since we could then expand CC support far beyond the Hauppauge PVR250 cards that are known to work now.

If we get this all worked out then I can add all the needed info for enabling CC(using any of these cards) to the SageTV FAQ. With this much hardware, hopefully supporting CC. We'd have a much better chance of getting Frey to add CC to SageTV. Even going beyond this current method of processing a finished mpeg2 recording. Frey could tie into the VBI/CC pin of the cards' filters and we'd have CC for MPEG2s that are still in the process of recording(Live TV). Hauppauge already does a similiar thing with their WinTV2000 app and BTV is rumored to be adding CC for PVR250's to the next version of BTV. It would be awesome if Frey could go even farther and support CC for all MCE cards too.

/justme

[snoop244]

Yes I'm assuming MCE imposes some sort of standard approach to this. On my MCE machine, I looked in the ATI e-home driver section in the registry to see if there were any flags to set, and their weren't. The risk with the e-home (unlike the 250) is that it was ONLY intended for MCE. I wonder if the e-home drivers look for an MCE registry key to turn on CC? Alternatively' is it possible that it is always turned on and it depends on the playback application to show it?

I don't know a lot about registry hacks. I did a quick search in the registry for "CC" but it came up with a bunch of GUIDs that randomly use CC, so I stopped that approach and that's when the wife put an unceremonious stop to things. Apologies. Sadly I'll be away from a computer for three or four days. I'll get back on this next week.

BTW, if my registry search continues to yield nothing obvious, is there a way for me to identify registry changes made by the MS Media Center itself when I turn on/off CC? I guess I'm looking for a way to pinpoint differences in the registry after a configuration change is made in a peice of software. It's possible, I suppose, that MCE has some other config file that handles this sort of thing. I'll have a look.

S.

[edmc]

me> Big warning: The eHome driver will CRASH WinXP.

snoop244> What do you mean by this? I've had e-homes
snoop244> working perfectly in 3 different XP machines with
snoop244> Hauppauge cards without a crash.

I should have been more clear and not require a deep dive into my long diatribe:

Installing the eHome driver which loads the Hauppauge PVR-250 will crash WinXP.

Of course I did not mean to suggest the eHome driver will crash WinXP when loaded for an actual eHome :-)

snoop244> Strangely, I also had the opposite problem: my
snoop244> e-home got recognized by XP as a Hauppauge
snoop244> card when I used the wizard without intervening.

Boy, now that is a big surprise. I wonder what the SVID is for the eHome card. Apparently it matches one in your .INF file for your Hauppauge driver (assuming your .INF is like mine and fully specifies the SVIDs rather than claiming them all like the eHome .INF did).

justme> Does anyone(snoop244?) here have more than 1 eHome in a single machine?

I did and it worked great. That is - until 1 of my 2 failed...

I'm now "suffering" with only a single eHome and a single PVR-250 in my HTPC.

[justme]

edmc
Thanks for the info, about multiple eHomes successfully working together. Sorry about the untimely demise of your eHome.

snoop244

Alternatively' is it possible that it is always turned on and it depends on the playback application to show it?

That's very possible. Now that I have the reg key setting in the section for my PVR250, it puts the CC in ALL DVD stream recordings. My biggest concern is that the standard MCE uses will involve that funky wrapper MCE puts around the MPEG2 file. If it's put there then we'd almost certianly never get it to work on nonMCE systems. I'm hoping they aren't putting it there, since this means that the mpeg2 wouldn't play back CC when burnt to DVD for a stabdalone player. With the PVR250's method, most standalone DVD players can get the CC from a DVD(made from a PVR250 mpeg2). But then again Microsoft put that MCE wrapper on, to prevent easy file copying/duplication.

Is there a way for me to identify registry changes made by the MS Media Center itself when I turn on/off CC?

OK, there is a way to monitor registry changes. Most people suggest Regmon. I've used it before(long long time ago) and you'll get tons of data about reg changes and what made them. There's a way to tell Regmon what programs to watch, but I'm not sure how(I'll try and download regmon and find out). In this case I'm guessing you want to watch the MCE frontend that runs over WinXP. Is that the program that turns CC on/off. Either way time will help narrow the search down.

My thanks for your time. I understand about wives and computers. That's why I just built a second system. Of course, I got the newer/faster one.

/justme

[snoop244]

Justme,

I haven't had a chance to do anything with CC since my last post. I did, however, send a PM to a guy who pulled CC from the MCE format (dvr-ms). He's one of the authors of a popular program that converts the MCE captures into the wmv format (along with CC). I'll copy his repsonse below. I'm not sure that it moves things forward, but I'll post it all the same. I think he is speculating about ATI. Here it is:

"Microsoft’s dvr-ms file had a separate stream for the line 21 data. This is the raw CC data, 2 bytes per frame. We dumped that into a file. My contribution was to write the code to convert it into legible text. I used the documentation at:

http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/.../CC_CODES.HTML

to understand what the bytes meant.


My impression is that most mpeg-2 decoders offer a line21 output (programmatically). Once you figure out how to get the data it should be the same for any mpeg file regardless of which card produced it. The problem may be that the drivers for the card produce mpeg-2 files without the line 21. ATI for instance only supports CC in their proprietary format, right? Same for Microsoft. In some ways it seems as if mpeg-2 does not support CC, but then I read other info that leads me to believe that it is in there. That’s about all I know about it.



Thanks,

Jose"

S.