Xcard plugin (alpha 0.0.8 - Jan 16)

[ErsatzTom]

Er, no. But it so happens that I've got a big deadline later today, so maybe after that I could give it a go. Thanks for reminding me and for having so much patience.

t

[MartinR]

Originally Posted by ErsatzTom

Well, this is the problem:

12:19:53 - <setupXCardOsd>: No OSD board found (ERROR: 80040154/Class not registered )

I've never seen that or heard it reported. You might want to try uninstalling and reinstalling the Xcard drivers and applications and see what you get. If that doesn't work, we can try registering a couple of things by hand.

t

Hi,

I'm wondering if there was ever a resolution to this problem, as I seem to have encountered it myself.

My log file looks the same as the OPs.

Thanks,
Martin.

[laurenglenn]

I went out and got an xCard after reading this thread. The plugin works very well (especially with the component output)!

The dithering is almost unnoticeable in my ShowLogos that I love to use so much.

I noticed a huge slowdown in the STV due to the extensive transparency and gradient fill, so after reading the threads on the xCard, I changed it so it uses the "translucent_rendering" property in Sage.Properties. If it's changed to FALSE, the gradient fills and transparency is turned off. I now only see about 1/2 second delay.

I also took out the background image for the menus and turned it to a solid color. That also seemed to help a bit.

Thanks for all the hard work with this plug-in. It's great to have hardware playback without the problems I had when using the PVR350.

Lauren

[ErsatzTom]

I'm really happy to hear it is working for you. And you are right, anything you can do to reduce the total number of colors will dramatically improve speed. I've envisioned a number of other possible optimizations in the quantizer but obviously fixing the various bugs has top priority.

t

[MartinR]

Originally Posted by MartinR

Hi,

I'm wondering if there was ever a resolution to this problem, as I seem to have encountered it myself.

My log file looks the same as the OPs.

Thanks,
Martin.

Hi all.

I managed to resolve the issue with this error:

12:19:53 - <setupXCardOsd>: No OSD board found (ERROR: 80040154/Class not registered )

by reinstalling my XCard driver. I suspect that I had an earlier driver installed, and that updating the driver didn't work. I ended up removing the MPEG decoder, and rescanning the hardware in the Device Manager. I could then point it at the new driver and install. After a subsequent system crash (I recommend rebooting immediately if you do this), the plugin now works with OSD!

Great stuff!!

I look forward to playing with it.

Thanks for a great plug in. This has been sorely lacking in SageTV for years.

BTW: I'm using the XCard/PDI/DScaler combo, so I'll be sure to report back if there are any issues.

Martin.

[laurenglenn]

Is there a way to make it so we can set the properties in Real Time? By this, I mean to change the output from S-Video to YUV without having to shutdown Sage?

I've seen it done with TVedia (which pales in comparison with regard to PVR features when compared to Sage) so it must be possible in some way.

Lauren

[ErsatzTom]

I could make a private api that would allow STVs to make configuration changes but it isn't part of the existing api. When I have time to work on the plugin again, though, bug fixes will be my first priority.

t

[jan smit]

Tom,
Do you still plan to fix the PAL-problem?

Regards,

jan

[fieldeffect]

My emails to Sigma still disappear into a black hole... grrrr

Out of interest, how much faster would the screen rendering algorithm be if it just used a lookup table to map to 256 indexed colours?

I was thinking along the lines of a program that you run in your STV directory which reduces the number of colours (but not the colour depth) in all the graphics to a single combined 256 and writes a file with the RGB values, then the plugin could do a straight lookup of the high colour interface into the 256 that it outputs to the Xcard?

The beauty of this being that a NDA wouldn't be required to write the program that does the graphics mods.

Or would that not make things much faster?

Most of the STVs seem to use the same basic colour schemes throughout, so the impact of having to share a 256 palette between all graphics within the STV probably wouldn't be that big a deal.

Nick.

[ErsatzTom]

Yes but my life is totally insane right now. That bug, though, remains on the top of my list of things to fix.

Originally Posted by jan smit

Tom,
Do you still plan to fix the PAL-problem?

Regards,

jan

[ErsatzTom]

Originally Posted by fieldeffect

My emails to Sigma still disappear into a black hole... grrrr

I'm not surprised. It is notoriously difficult to get their SDK. I'm not sure why I got lucky.

Out of interest, how much faster would the screen rendering algorithm be if it just used a lookup table to map to 256 indexed colours?

I was thinking along the lines of a program that you run in your STV directory which reduces the number of colours (but not the colour depth) in all the graphics to a single combined 256 and writes a file with the RGB values, then the plugin could do a straight lookup of the high colour interface into the 256 that it outputs to the Xcard?

The beauty of this being that a NDA wouldn't be required to write the program that does the graphics mods.

Or would that not make things much faster?

Most of the STVs seem to use the same basic colour schemes throughout, so the impact of having to share a 256 palette between all graphics within the STV probably wouldn't be that big a deal.

Nick.

Yes, it would make it much faster. However, if you tried to look at photos, including cd or dvd cover art, it would have to fall back to another method as they would certainly have colors that didn't appear in your index. As a matter of fact, that is exactly one of the methods that I thought about using to speed up the ui. One thing that would definitely help you is if I had time to make the color quantization part a plugin interface (as I've always planned to do) and release the source code for the interface and the current color quantizer. I honestly don't know if I'll have time for that though.

t

[jan smit]

Thanks, I'm looking forward.

jan

[esubramanian]

Help! I made changes to the properties to use the component output on xcard and it was working for sometime. But, it stopped working now. I renistalled xcard drivers and also this plugin. XMP works fine.

No OSD board found (ERROR: 80004005/Unspecified error )

Any ideas?

[ErsatzTom]

Well, that can happen if something else already has the xcard open. Also, do you have both the osd and mediaplayer plugins configured correctly?

t

[esubramanian]

Originally Posted by ErsatzTom

Well, that can happen if something else already has the xcard open. Also, do you have both the osd and mediaplayer plugins configured correctly?

t

Yes. And it was working fine. Something happened after I installed the latest beta. I uninstalled sage completely and then retried it. Also, xcard drivers.
It worked once after new sage install. Also, sage sometimes gets stuck. I can see it in the process list, but I cannot even kill it using task manager. Not sure if it keeps something open. But XMP works fine everytime?

[ErsatzTom]

xmp might be using a different api or have code to bypass this limitation. I don't have any idea about that. If, however, you have a stuck sage process that has the xcard open, the plugin will not be able to open it in another process.

t

[esubramanian]

Are you currently working on getting DVD play working with this plug-in so that we don't have to close sage and switch to xmp?
Also, does anyone has a better way of switching between sage and xmp using the remote? I currently have a button mapped to a command that closes sage and launches xmp, with a delay in between. But, sometimes the sage window does not close in time and the xmp tries to open before that and causes problems.
Tom - You had mentioned we can use closeOSD() and openOSD() methods. Can you explain a bit more about this? Thanks

[naln]

Hi,

Thanks Tom for all the hardwork on this plugin and fantastic support in troubleshooting.

I finally have my Xcard setup working! A driver/sage reinstalls fixed the problems (I had the OSD board not found- error as well).

Does anyone have this working with Plextor (.avi) recordings and Aver 180 (.ts or HD) recordings. I found that the image freezes up and UI itself freezes if I attempt to play/ switch between these formats. If I restart sage, I am able to play HD and avi files- but switching between file formats- specially from avi to anything else more often than not results in a freeze up. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

naln.

[naln]

Originally Posted by MartinR

Hi,

I'm wondering if there was ever a resolution to this problem, as I seem to have encountered it myself.

My log file looks the same as the OPs.

Thanks,
Martin.

Hi,

Had the same problem- The latest drivers from Sigma (2003) should fix this issue ( I bought my Xcard in mid 2004- the drivers on the CD did not work for me either). Complete unistall and reinstall of the Xcard and Sage fixed the problem for me. Hope this helps.

naln.

[RoosterX]

This Xcard plugin, what does it support, everything the xcard supports, divx/xvid/mpeg2+1 and so on, and the menu's are showing in ok quality, just curious.. cause i would like alittle better picture quality on my SDTV from my Ati 9550 card with overlay.. and also maybe my PC wouldnt get so hot.. (since there wouldn't be so much CPU activity?

Oh and i use a Hauppage PVR 250, Athlon XP 1200@1000MHz(yes downclocked), 512 Mb CL 2 SD ram, 160 Gb Seagate P-ATA disk.
TIA