Any Chance for Xcard OSD Support?

[RobDMB]

It seems from this thread that there truly are a lot of people interested in Xcard support. I wonder why sage wont look into it. The fact that Tvedia supports it natively makes me think I will be giving that program a serious chance. Now I just have to order my Xcard and get it installed. I need to lower my cpu usage so I can still use my computer for other things while I am playing a dvd or tv show through to my tv. I hope the xcard will do this for.

[jptaz]

I can definitely confirm that with SageTV or TVedia you will see very low CPU utilization and just about anything you do on the PC will not disrupt watching TV or DVD.

John

[RobDMB]

Awesome thats just what I'm hoping for.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by RobDMB

It seems from this thread that there truly are a lot of people interested in Xcard support. I wonder why sage wont look into it.

A couple reasons occur to me:

1. What appears to be a lot of people here is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the overall number of users.
   
   
2. The Xcard only supports 256 colors for its OSD. Got any pointers to code for converting 32 bit color to 256 palettized color quickly? That would probably have to be the first step.

The Xcard does work great -- I used it on a p2-400 for nearly a year too & never had a problem with it. I moved to a much faster PC, but still use it.

- Andy

[RobDMB]

True it is probably a limited number of users in this thread but the limitation about the OSD with the Xcard can be overcome. I am pretty sure I remember reading that Tvedia was able to work around this and they use the Xcard to display the OSD at full color

[Opus4]

I didn't say the OSD couldn't be done... I said it has a 256 color limit that you have to work with.

- Andy

[jptaz]

Honestly I think Sage goofed.

If you look at the Jove Player forums I think you will see that the number of people with problems with the OSD or X Card Crashing and not working is extremely low when cmpared to the PVR 350. The X Card has so many advantages yet every time this is mention, SHS and others, have always complained about it not having a 32 Bit OSD. This is not the end of the world. I would guess that if people were given the choice of a stable hardware decoding platform with OSD versus that smoking heap of #%*#% from Hauppauge with 32 Bit OSD they would live with dithered images or a custom STVs for an XCard any day of the week. I am sure if the PVR 350 turned out to be reliable many people would be praising them, but it was pretty short sighted to put development effort into a product that largely only benfitted single computer users who did not plan on playing DVDs. A very small market considering that what is the point in an HTPC without a DVD.

X Card
=====
DVD Playback
MP4 Playback
MP3 Playback
HDTV resolution output on not copy writed material
Extremelhy stable product from a company that knows how to write a driver

XCard $84.30 at buy.com
PVR 250 $128.99 at buy.com

for same functionality as PVR 350 for $48 more...or if you got the 250 MCE it is even less.

PVR 350
======
No DVD Playback
No MP4 Playback
Horrible Stability issues and the worst drivers in the industry.
No HDTV support.
$165.99 at buy.com

EDIT: Error...post was about PVR 350 not XCard.

I Still think they really blew it on this one and should really rethink the OSD on XCard with the anouncement of the Plextor MP4 encoder as it provides MP4 Decoding.

Just my honest rant...nothing personal meant by it.

John

[Opus4]

I'm not going to argue whether an Xard OSD would be great... I think it would be too.

But...

Originally Posted by jptaz

Jeff went as far as to say that he had a quick and dirty OSD working in the middle of last year on the XCard.

When was this? The only comment I recall about the Xcard OSD was when the 350 preliminary OSD was mentioned (before 2.0 was ever released) & there was a comment that adding an Xcard OSD could possibly fit into the design of the SageTV program, not that there was an OSD working for it already.

Sigma has an SDK for the Xcard, but they have a great policy of not making it publicly available. I've asked them for it -- you have to be some big company before they will even consider it; they won't deal with an individual. What a great concept. It is as if they are saying: "We have a product for you to use, but we don't want anyone to develop support for the thing so that it can be used by more people. We prefer to keep its market as limited as possible so that we don't overshoot our expected sales estimates. Wouldn't be prudent."

Edit: and I still didn't say the 256 color limit meant it couldn't be done. It is just a limit to work around.

- Andy

[jptaz]

Andy,

You are right...Jeff said that about the PVR 350 not the X Card... I guess I did not remeber correctly...editing previus post.

John

[Crowdx42]

Hi,
just gotta say, the Sage OSD as it is would be pretty identical in 256 colors,,, do a screen capture of the menu and then change it's format in Paintshop Pro or Photoshop. NO difference. Whatever the difference in coding, I have no idea.

I presume the Hauppauge MVP menu is using the same setup as the way it is done for the PVR 350 (same gpu etc).

One thing I will say here is that due to the fact that no one has ever outputted the OSD of Sage onto the X-Card and so we really don't know if the X-Card would be stable with OSD? On Jove Player is there problems on the PVR 350 also with their OSD??

Personally since I originally bought the X-Card I love it much more than the VERY limited PVR 350 I now use, the AC3 alone is a huge bonus.

BTW On TVedia Forum they talk about a special 32bit OSD that is working on the X-Card
Tvedia Forum Thread

Just some thoughts.
Patrick

[jptaz]

JovePlayer was designed around the X Card. It uses the X Card OSD features extensively without failure. So the X Card is a stable card with very stable drivers. Even the earlier drivers were stable with minor bugs. I do not think even Hauppauge has an application that is stable on the PVR 350. I do not believe that JovePlayer/TVedia even bothered attempting to make the OSD on the PVR 350 work as they had a far superioir product in the X Card and waited until the PVR 250 issues had been resolved before adding that.

I have no doubt in Jeffs programming abilities. I personally think that Hauppauge has proven for years that they have the worst software developers known to man. None of the drivers and or software has been written correctly to work in diverse environments. They still can not manage to make PVR 250s with different chipsets work well together. The failures on the PVR 350 are 100% Hauppauges fault.

Dan and Jeff would have been far better off to make and arrangement with Xcard to Bundle SageTVClient with the XCard, or SageTV, XCard, and PVR 250.

Patrick,
Download TVedia and you will see how well the OSD works on the XCard. TVedia is not made by geniuses, the Product they are using is just thta much better than the PVR 350. Jeff could provide a rock solid OSD on the XCard in a relatively short period of time.


General Rant,

I checked and SageTV still does not have any warnings as to the potential compatibility problems in the PVR 350 bundles in the store. I think this is a very bad business practice. I applaud them for discontinuing the sale of the Roslyn boards and allowing people who bought the multiple board tuners to exchange them for PVR MCE cards ( My friend is still waiting for his so my system is still recording his stuff too ).

Frey Needs to realize after the PVR 350 fiasco, the Roslyn disaster that they need to look to more reliable vendors for designing there product around. Hopefully the Plextor encoder decision will mark a move in that direction, but honestly I think the product is still new and they should have added support for a rock solid product like the XCard. Plextor is a better company than Hauppauge by a huge margin, but these are still new products.

John

[Opus4]

I haven't tried that software since it was called Jove -- probably a little less than a year ago. It was my understanding that they were simply dithering the OSD down to 256 colors... has that changed? That really wouldn't be a problem in SageTV & the Xcard can do transparency too, so the OSD/UI could be semi-transparent with video still playing full screen in the background. The only places it would look strange are such things as album art and the picture library. But, for that you can create custom palettes to minimize the image degradation... unless you encode it into a video stream (?), which perhaps would require a little more horsepower than a p2-400.

I, too, think a SageTV + Xcard + encoder bundle would be great & would cause fewer headaches for their tech support department.

- Andy

[Crowdx42]

As was said earlier,,, the Xcard as a client decoder just makes so much more sense. I only use my 350 for decoding due to problems when it was both encoding and decoding at the same time, so in that respect the encoder is redundent. Otherwise the XCard decodes Divx, MPEG and also AC3 audio, these are all features which would add so much more to Sage. At present I use Zoomplayer to playback Divx and also DVDs (I have optical out on the motherboard and so use it on the normal desktop through a second input on the home theater amp).
Everyone here is striving for the best video/audio experience possible, the lack of AC3 on the PVR 350 is a big minus and also the way Sage currently handles formats other than MPEG ( I often get lockups and glitches playing back files not recorded through Sage).

Patrick

[RobDMB]

Tvedia's website clearly states that they have a patent pending OSD engine to overcome the 256 color limit of the xcard to display a full range of colors so it must be possible to use more than 256 colors somehow.

[x[corwyn]]

Its an OSD..How many colors do you REALLY need? I just need to know what channels I am going to and move around a menu. Maybe I'm weird but I don't need 5 million colors for a menu system. The picture quality of the show I am watching is important, but lets face it...I don't give a rats ass about making my menu system fru fru and take 15 very cool looking colorful steps to do what I would like in 1 color and 1 step. Maybe I'm a killjoy for everyone...sorry but 256 colors sounds like about 250 more than I will honestly need.

[Crowdx42]

Well I downloaded and installed TVedia and wow,,,, the UI is just great on the XCard, same transparancies etc as Sage does and it really does work great, can view all the formats including Xvid, Divx, MPEG2, Real Media and then also plays any music file.
The cool part is that they pretty much all work out of the box with an XCard installed, full AC3 audio, DVDs with AC3.
Currently for AC3 I have to go back to the desktop and use WinDVD with Optical out due to using the PVR 350.
From what I have read on their forum the only real glitch that TVedia has compared to Sage is multiple tuner support and how it presently has no decent conflict controls, BUT they are also working on that.
Web browsing is out of the box also without modified stv files like Sage.
Also USBUIRT is supported out of the box with a simple set of commands that it learns from your remote.
All in all it seems so far to be a great solution for XCard users.
Again I cannot see why Sage does not get their R&D to do the UI for the XCard, if TVedia can do such a nice job there is no reason Sage can't.
Patrick

[mlbdude]

Someone once told me that the XCard OSD would only support 256 colors. Can anyone that knows confirm or deny this?

EDIT: Noticed all the threads above. Got excited and posted. Also, the XCard is getting pretty old. Anything new coming out?

[Opus4]

The Xcard OSD has a 256 color limit, from everything I've seen on the subject. I'm not sure if TVedia is simply converting everything down (like they used to), found a way around it, or if they are using some way to put the OSD into a video stream. I doubt the latter would work (but don't know for certain) for putting the OSD on top of a currently playing video, but I would think it would be something that could be done when playing back something like a picture library, where no other video is currently playing anyway -- that would give you full color images w/a 256 color UI, along the lines of comments I saw on their forum at some point.

A while back, SHS commented that there was nothing coming out to replace the Xcard, but it is still quite useful for the time being. Maybe he'll see this & comment further.

- Andy

[jptaz]

Crowdx42,

Two big short comings of TVedia for me are:

No EPG Guide...XML TV.
No Client capability to allow client server like SageTV.

If I didn't need Clients I might feel differently and give XML TV a shot, but I have heard the data is even worse than Zap2it.

I may install an old copy JovePlayer 2.0 if SageTVClient does not support OSD on Xcard when I am finished with my master bed room this winter. I am pretty sure I still have an old version of JovePlayer 2.0 and my license key and just point the directory to my server.

John

[jptaz]

mlbdude,

I am not sure why Sigma Designs would bother making a new model of the XCard just to support a 32 bit OSD. I think that is the only thing that they could do to improve the product other than maybe adding a DVI connection to an HDTV, but at this point the component out looks great on my HDTV Set and it already has Digital Out.

For $85 it is a good addition to an old PC to make it a viable Client. While it can't compare to a Media MVP $87.67 from buy.com for people with Standard Definition TV sets and no desire to playback MP4 files it definitely is an excellent product.

I wonder if a demuxed HD TV Stream could be played on the XCard? It does support MPEG2 which is basically what a HD TV Stream is. This would be a great product in combination with a DVico FusionHDTV3 Gold QAM HD Tuner for $149 at Digital Connection.

EDIT: Nope...XCard can only decode MPEG2 Files with a resolution up to 720x576. The scaled Picture quality of the XCard is still much better than what my P3 733Mhz Machine can manage using Intervideo Decoders and anything else is too CPU intensive to be managable on this box.

John