Archive for the ‘BBC HD’ Category

BBC HD pixelation on nVidia 8800GTS card

Friday, June 11th, 2010

…and it’s gone!

For the past 2 years since installing my satellite I’ve been watching BBC HD over Freesat on my lounge Media Center with pixelation for the first 5 seconds of every show, including when I skip forward and backward which makes it very frustrating when trying to jump around programmes. This has never been a problem with my other machines with ATi cards so have always put it down to the nVidia card.

But lo and behold, this evening it’s gone!?! I can’t see any updates in Windows that explain it so perhaps it’s a BBC stream adjustment?

I’ve never seen it on ITV HD and have read that it can be down to the format of the BBC stream itself.

Whatever the reason I feel like I have a proper Media Center now; I feel liberated Smile

Posted in BBC HD, Media Center | No Comments »

DVBViewer settings

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

In case anyone is wondering what settings are required for reception of ITV/BBC HD then this is the method I have used:

I already have dual-tuner Freeview reception in Media Center and that has worked flawlessly for the last 2 years, however to get HD has been an itch I’ve needed to scratch and for that it has required DVBViewer. (I know that hacking the TV Pack for Vista also allows HD channels but I haven’t bothered with that method – too many things to go wrong.)
I’ve been able to watch BBC HD in the free PowerCinema software that came with the Hauppauge card for ages, however the PowerCinema software has little ability to successfully configure the HD reception meaning that it defaults to the narrative track on BBC HD (annoying) and won’t receive ITV HD at all.

So I finally bought and installed DVBViewer this week and ran the simple wizard setup, then scanning the 10847 frequency I picked up BBC HD. I’ve also edited the channel listings in DVBViewer to make the AC3 channel a favourite. (N.B. AC3 filter is neccessary for AC3 audio!)

Once BBC HD was happy it was then a case of Googling the ITV HD settings which gave me the frequency 11428 to scan and the channel id of 10510(Radio). Then editing a few more settings on this 10510 channel I added it again as a favourite and now I can simply load DVBViewer and by selecting favourite channel up/down I move between BBC and ITV HD. Great!

Another nice touch of DVBViewer is that it can be set to disable AV (mute audio and video) when minimised to the taskbar so that it won’t interfere with Media Center program watching.

DVBViewer will do until Windows7 is released this summer.


Posted in BBC HD, DVBViewer, ITV HD | 1 Comment »