TotalMedia Extreme for BluRay playback

[SWKerr]

Has anyone upgraded the TotalMedia Extreme that came with the HD-PVR to the version that can play BluRays??? I can watch the m2ts file from a ripped BluRay perfectly with TotalMedia Theatre. It appears from the web site that I can upgrade for $40. I would like to know if someone has done this and how it works.

To date I have used the Cyberlink 7 that came with the drive but there are several things that bother me about it.
1. The registration prompt never seems to go away. (Really bothers me.)
2. It does not respect the auto play setting in windows and runs every time I insert a disk.
3. It will not play ripped BD disks after I update it.
4. It will not play m2ts files smoothly. It will play directly from the disk perfectly at 1080 but when I open up the ripped file it plays back poorly. The same file will play back fine in TME. (The same jerky playback also will happen in Sage using the Cyberlink codec. Can’t recall if Sage is ok the ArcSoft one.)
5. I use EventGhost to control Cyberlink by remote but it is less than ideal. (Are the keyboard controls and navigation in TME better)

Cyberlink 8 seems a little pricy and if it will not fix the above issues I don’t think it would be an option either.

I would like to have smooth playback of the raw m2ts files in Sage as well. Has anyone got this working. I generally re-encode all the rips I want in the permanent library as h.264\mkv files but I don’t want to go through all that for the one time netflix rentals and I would still prefer to watch them in Sage.

[Razillian]

I upgraded a while back, but the full release version of TME did not support AAC audio (which is what the HDPVR was capturing in at the time), so I switched back to the Hauppauge version.

I now only use ArcSoft as my AAC decoder. For Blueray and H264 I use PDVD8 Ultra. I think the picture quality is much better with Cyberlink over Arcsoft, just crisper and clearer. With PDVD8 I don't have any popups or such, and after a quick change in the options it doesn't try to play movies automatically when I insert a disc. The one (possibly major) drawback you will have is that it doesn't support bluerays from a harddrive.

[HelenWeathers]

I have to chime in here on behalf of Total Media Theater. I used Cyberlink PDVD8 Ultra until a few months ago when I switched to TMT. I didn't see any real difference in PQ between the two. My reasons were strictly ease of use. TMT had better support for hand held remote controls at the time I switched and interfaced better with SageTV (I use Dynamic Menus to run TMT from within SageTV).

TMT does support AAC audio.
TMT does respect auto play setting in windows unless you select autoplay in TMT.
TMT will play ripped BD disks after muxing and will play m2ts files smoothly.
I use SageTVlauncher to control SageTV and when I run TMT from within Sage the remote works TMT playback functions and the Back button returns you to SageTV. The Info Button brings up the TMT menu for Sound, Picture opts, etc while in TMT.

BigBill did figure out a way to run PDVD8 from within SageTV, but I'm not sure how well he got the remote to function.

[Razillian]

Without any empirical data to back this up, I am going to go out on a limb and say the difference of quality between Cyberlink and Arcsoft comes down to a difference between nVidia and ATI (and also type of card from the given manufacturer as well).

PDVD8 makes use of the nVidia Purevideo tech (and Cyberlink PDVD8 is the recommended package by nVidia for Vista playback with EVR). Last I checked, PDVD8 did not have full ATI AVIVO integrated into it (was due out this month, but not sure where it is at). So by the nature of the beast nVidia cards capable of all the Purevideo functions will look better in PDVD8 than an ATI card.

I have a personal hatred of Cyberlink. The moment PDVD8 runs it unregisters the nVidia Purevideo Audio Decoders, which is what I have always used in Sage. It also has more bloat than other comparable packages, loads more junk at startup, and does some funky things that take tweaking to get right. This is why I tried out the full version of Arcsoft TME, but with my 8600GT video card PDVD8 looked much crisper and sharper (6 months ago when I did the comparison).

In the end, I went back to PDVD8. Got everything tweaked once and have left it alone since. It works for me great now and I love the picture for H264 and BD.

[Taddeusz]

I use the PowerDVD 8 Ultra codecs just fine with full EVR acceleration on my Radeon 3870. I don't know how that's not supporting ATI very well? I see that it supports my Radeon just fine. At least using the Cyberlink decoders with SageTV you need to make sure that DXVA support is enabled in each individual codec from each one's codec properties.

[AtariJeff]

Honestly, I could not get either of them to play m2ts or mkv files reliably in Sage. HD-PVR recordings work fine with both but installing TME completely broke DVD, DivX, and music playback (mostly sound issues). I know tweaking the encoder merits has an affect but I could never figure out the right values. PowerDVD installed with the least amount of damage but does have the annoyances mentioned above. I'm just glad I use an HD200 as my primary means of watching TV.

[Clift]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

I have to chime in here on behalf of Total Media Theater. I used Cyberlink PDVD8 Ultra until a few months ago when I switched to TMT. I didn't see any real difference in PQ between the two. My reasons were strictly ease of use. TMT had better support for hand held remote controls at the time I switched and interfaced better with SageTV (I use Dynamic Menus to run TMT from within SageTV).

TMT does support AAC audio.
TMT does respect auto play setting in windows unless you select autoplay in TMT.
TMT will play ripped BD disks after muxing and will play m2ts files smoothly.
I use SageTVlauncher to control SageTV and when I run TMT from within Sage the remote works TMT playback functions and the Back button returns you to SageTV. The Info Button brings up the TMT menu for Sound, Picture opts, etc while in TMT.

BigBill did figure out a way to run PDVD8 from within SageTV, but I'm not sure how well he got the remote to function.

I have to agree here and I have a 8600GT. TMT looks the same to me as PDVD8. beside I had an issue with PDVD8 and that is it would freeze up in Spiderman3 action sequence (the first one involving the green goblin 2) for no apparent reason. TMT has not given me any problems.

[Taddeusz]

What I had to do to get good playback with the Cyberlink 8 decoders for video and AC3Filter for audio was to forget about setting default codecs in the properties file. I set the properties file to always use dshow. Set it to use EVR for playback. Enabled DXVA in all the Cyberlink video codecs. Adjusted the merits with DSF Manager and verifed with graphedit that the Cyberlink H.264 and MPEG decoders are chosen by default along with AC3Filter. I also installed Haali which is very important for dshow playback of MKV files. All this combined gives me full accelerated EVR playback in Vista with HDHR and HD-PVR recordings and with all my DVD and BD rips which are in MKV format with H.264 video and AC3 audio.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Clift

I have to agree here and I have a 8600GT. TMT looks the same to me as PDVD8. beside I had an issue with PDVD8 and that is it would freeze up in Spiderman3 action sequence (the first one involving the green goblin 2) for no apparent reason. TMT has not given me any problems.

When I was trying to get full accelerated playback I had some strange artifacting with the TMT codecs that looks perfect with Cyberlink. For me there was definitely a quality difference between the two that favored Cyberlink. Finally achieved smooth playback of HD-PVR recordings using the Cyberlink decoders with an updated splitter for SageTV.