oliverredfox

[oliverredfox]

Had to ask a friend who’s taking classes on networking right now.  http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/ should do everything you want.

[oliverredfox]

You could roll through channels 1,6,&11 for quick and dirty testing to see if it helps.

[oliverredfox]

The laptop might handle errors better than the bridge you were using and be less prone to thinking it lost the connection.

[oliverredfox]

I’m going to go with the obivous suggestion first (just in case you haven’t tried it).  Have you done frequency scans to check congestion on the various channels to try and find one with minimal issues?  (In case it’s an interference issue and not hardware)

[oliverredfox]

I’m sure there’s a better way than this to check, but if you’ve got a PC monitor with DVI or HDMI in that doesn’t have HDCP you can check off it.

[oliverredfox]

Looks like Shaw might not provide cablecards.  https://community.shaw.ca/thread/4799  Apparently Canada doesn’t use them unlike down in the USA according to the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD  That’s a bummer.

[oliverredfox]

There are few cable card devices that rock.  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815345006 is one example.  You can trade in your cable box with your provider and get a cable card from them.  It’ll probably run you a few dollars less per month than the box did fee wise.  And it’ll give you all your line-up right on your PC.  Plus you’ll be able to record 3 or more shows at onces (depending on which model capture device you buy).  The Ceton model is really popular too.

edit: link to Ceton http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815706001

[oliverredfox]

With how cheap cable card devices are for HTPCs, it might be a good time pick one up and cut out the STB entirely =)

[oliverredfox]

Svideo means you’re getting a 480i signal which is 704×480 interlaced vs the 1920×1080 progressive you TV can display.  So a huge drop in resolution.  If you ran the cable line right into your HTPC and watched an HD QAM encoded channel, it would look like your blu-rays.

[oliverredfox]

You’re probably not set at native resolution.  You want to be at 1080p or 1920×1080 (should have an option for one or the other in the video settings).  And refresh would be at 60.

 

And there may be a setting on your TV too, for 1:1 pixel mapping (different sets have different names for this).

 

And just to ask the obvious, are you watching HD channels (because SD channels will look more noticibly bad on larger screens)?

[oliverredfox]

About 2 years ago when the power company installed wireless meters, it killed my logitech wireless gaming mouse.  It began getting ghost signals that made it worthless, even from a foot away from the receiver. (apparently a common problem with the wireless meters and some devices).  But my htpc keyboard was able to keep working great despite that.  I run it from about 15′ away (and through a wall).  It’s an IOGEAR GKM561R.  I can’t be sure that your interference won’t be a problem with it, but if you’ve got a store nearby that carries it, give it whirl and return it if it doesn’t.

[oliverredfox]

I still use MCE for watching/recording TV shows but I do most of my movie/TV backup serving off Plex Media Server.  I find it convenient for watching on my tablets, Roku, and LG TV (has support build in for it).  I don’t know how many movies you just ripped but I’ve got a decent sized collection and it hasn’t brought my system down yet.

[oliverredfox]

While I love my Passive 3D LED LCD TV, I miss the deep blacks of my old plasma (With careful settings the LED TV gets close, but I still can tell the difference.)  The last plasma I owned had built in anti-burn-in protection.  It would do a pixel shift (well, more than 1 pixel as it was adjustable).  I had it set up to shift the image 4 pixels to the right, then 4 pixels down, then 4 to the left, back to starting position and repeat.  I played a lot of video games, and there was the concern in the back of my head about burn in from game HUDs, but between the anti-burn-in tech and just general improvements to how plasma displays work I never had any issues, even after long marthon gaming sessions.  I never actively noticed the pixel shift feature but if I walked up to the screen and looked closely I could see if working (some people might be more sensative to it, so it’s worth turning on in store just make sure it doesn’t bug you).

[oliverredfox]

[quote=SJMaye]

In the mean time I will also wait to read more about Win8 MC before upgrading.  I would like to see if they are going to invest anytime in MC or just repackage what I already have.  They can keep the Metro interface.  I like MC just the way it is.  Only thing I have seen I like as much is XBMC.  I would switch in a minute if it could use my ceton card to record.

[/quote]

While METRO seems to be a love it or hate it type experience, and WMC seems to be pretty much just the same at 7’s, I’m surprised there isn’t more talk about the under the hood aspects of Win 8.  I’d posted link about music recording software performane in Win8 under the $40 upgrade deal thread ( http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applications/ if you hadn’t seen it) and it appears that there are some decent changes to the kernel from their benchmarks.  I’m curious to see if the kernel changes make any difference with any of the software I run on my HTPC.  I’ll be taking a sit back and wait approach as my Win7 system is “stable” (no reason to tempt fate), but I do wonder if the OS overhead reduction of Win8 will be of benifit (Theorectically, a smaller OS footprint could mean more HTPC software overhead, but I have no clue if that’ll make a real world difference.)

 

edit:  I’d love to see a resource benchmark comparision of a same machine running Win7 vs Win8 doing stuff like recording 4 hd streams (or more), background re-encoding, Blu-ray playback, etc to see the differences.

[oliverredfox]

Not certain but it sounds like you could have a HDCP problem.  You probably already have; but have you tried a different HDMI cable to see if it was having handshake issues?

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