Mac mini Vista Media Center Beta 2 Update
Hello.
Roughly a month ago I began a project to build my first media center. It began because I finally thought I could purchase an affordable, small and quiet pc - an unlikely choice for me - the mac mini.
After a few obstacles I got Vista on and was quite impressed. I liked it so much I purchased some more ram and now have a pleasent 1Gb and jumped my performance rating from a lowly one to a meagre 2 :)
The big picture was to demonstrate at home to the family that I could pull together all our content onto one machine. Its worked to an extent - the photos are great, videos good and the music is pretty good. My recorded TV and live TV experiences have been a bit poor. Heres my progress to date:
I first purchased a Compro VideoMate U3 which worked great in XP but was slow to initialise and became jerky and unusable after only a few uses. I even had the signal checked by the local antenna specialists (signal perfect).
I then used a colleagues DVico Fusion HDTV Usb and it worked "ok" in Vista but would blue screen when swapping channels - notably between HD and SD. I opted to use the Dvico provided Vista beta drivers.
I thought I could live with the Dvico if is was a bit smaller and didnt have the blue light so I opted to use a Dvico Fusion HDTV Nano. When it works it works well but I am finding each time I switch on I can only use specific channels. Each time a different set of channels do not work. Sometimes no channels work. Again I used the Dvico Vista Beta drivers. Rescaning has the same effect - random channels work fine and others do not.
On every TV tuner:
-setup I have found that resuming from sleep typically stops the Tuner from providing any channels
-scans usually take 10minutes+
-HD signals have always been of poor quality, jerky and mostly unwatchable
nb. other than MCE no other applications are running.
Other observations:
-On occassion audio stops after a change (use of tv tuner. use of video) and I have to disable the audio device and reenable for it to work.
-Usually swapping between video, recorded Tv and the tv tuner can cause instability in MCE for example blank screen or the screen freezing but MCE center still operating.
-When going to online spotlight more often than not the first time I enter I get a white screen. The second time everything works as normal
I am set to try the digitalnow tiny usb2.0 so will post with my findings with this device....
Roughly a month ago I began a project to build my first media center. It began because I finally thought I could purchase an affordable, small and quiet pc - an unlikely choice for me - the mac mini.
After a few obstacles I got Vista on and was quite impressed. I liked it so much I purchased some more ram and now have a pleasent 1Gb and jumped my performance rating from a lowly one to a meagre 2 :)
The big picture was to demonstrate at home to the family that I could pull together all our content onto one machine. Its worked to an extent - the photos are great, videos good and the music is pretty good. My recorded TV and live TV experiences have been a bit poor. Heres my progress to date:
I first purchased a Compro VideoMate U3 which worked great in XP but was slow to initialise and became jerky and unusable after only a few uses. I even had the signal checked by the local antenna specialists (signal perfect).
I then used a colleagues DVico Fusion HDTV Usb and it worked "ok" in Vista but would blue screen when swapping channels - notably between HD and SD. I opted to use the Dvico provided Vista beta drivers.
I thought I could live with the Dvico if is was a bit smaller and didnt have the blue light so I opted to use a Dvico Fusion HDTV Nano. When it works it works well but I am finding each time I switch on I can only use specific channels. Each time a different set of channels do not work. Sometimes no channels work. Again I used the Dvico Vista Beta drivers. Rescaning has the same effect - random channels work fine and others do not.
On every TV tuner:
-setup I have found that resuming from sleep typically stops the Tuner from providing any channels
-scans usually take 10minutes+
-HD signals have always been of poor quality, jerky and mostly unwatchable
nb. other than MCE no other applications are running.
Other observations:
-On occassion audio stops after a change (use of tv tuner. use of video) and I have to disable the audio device and reenable for it to work.
-Usually swapping between video, recorded Tv and the tv tuner can cause instability in MCE for example blank screen or the screen freezing but MCE center still operating.
-When going to online spotlight more often than not the first time I enter I get a white screen. The second time everything works as normal
I am set to try the digitalnow tiny usb2.0 so will post with my findings with this device....
posted by David @ 3:52 pm
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