Hi Guys,

I have a new set of BDA drivers for the VisionPlus DVB-t cards.
If anyone is interested in testing them please e-mail me

renura@digitalnow.com.au

Cheers

Renura

Renura,

Let me guess. They are Twinhan's own drivers (I found out about them by looking at the Media Portal Forums).

Kenneth,

Yes they are from Twinhan.

Cheers

Renura

does this mean visiondtv will work with bda drivers??

Not at the moment.

But all BDA compliant applications should work with it.

Cheers

Renura

interesting development - sure we could have seen this coming.

Hi Magnetik,

If you go through the history you will find that they had been promised to me more than one year ago. When I was the sole distributor of VP in Australia.

I guess better late than never!

Cheers

Renura

Hi Guys,

I have now given the BDA drivers to about a dozen people. I think that is enough for the moment. (just in case it is a virus that TwinHan is spreading:))

I will await for feedback from these people before making the drivers available to anyone for downlaod.

Cheers

Renura

true - I remeber all those battles

I still love my visionplus, havent had anything different - by my current BDA (Spectrum) and SS (paid for too!) rocks - and is very stable. keen to see how the Twinhan BDA offering stacks up...


reading kenneth's post - I had a looksee round Media Portal - looks like BDA support is very, very close - which could be a possible jump of ship for me to MP opensource solution.

good to see things in DTV software land starting to ramp up.... a new version of SS is on the card very soon we are told too. all this was very, very much needed.

ill post my feedback on the BDA drivers 2nite when i get home

Hi magnetik,

You haven't seen nothing yet!

Cheers

Renura

Okay first in with the feedback.

Machine is my HTPC - Windows XP, SP2. Only ever had Spectrum BDA's and Showshifter - never any VisionPlus drivers - period.

• Updated the two Spectrum BDA drivers in device manager to these new VisionPlus BDA's - all went smooth and painless. This is all you need - no reliance on the VisionPlus old drivers at all.
• Didnt reboot
• Started showshifter, picked the new BDA driver - crashed the first time (this could be due to SS Beta tho).
• Started SS again - changed the driver - worked fine even without a channel tune.
• Did a channel tune - seems slower than Spectrums BDA's
• Found all channels except for SBS for some reason
• Restarting Showshifter it takes about 1 min for SS to kick in, so there is a bug there with the BDA's - or possibly with SS -> BDA, though I never get that behaviour with Spectrums drivers
• Very stable running - have been watching TV for about 45mins now, flawless - tho Spectrum BDA's are just as good. There is a single black flicking line on the top left - now im sure from memory VisionDTV had exactly the same behaviour - not a major gripe.

Overall, promising - tho it offers nothing over Spectrums drivers - and the fact that startup of SS is very slow and SBS is not picked up means ill be sticking with Spectrum BDA's for the moment. Tho im sure these kinks will someday get ironed out.

keen to hear how others went.

Thanks to Renura for providing the Visionplus BDA drivers (v1.0.0.2) for testing. So here is my feedback based on 24 hours of running (no, not 24 hours of viewing).

First, prior to the upgrade I used ShowShifter DVB (Beta) with Spectrum DBA drivers v 1.5.3.3. Most channels stuttered occassionally (audio and visual) with noticably jerky pictures on 7, SBS and 10 HD. SS hung occasionally on channel change.

After upgrade to Visionplus DBA the stutters are no longer noticable and the jerkiness on the HD channels is perhaps reduced but is still noticable. Channel changes are slower and SS still hangs occassionally.

One strange phenomenon. When starting up this PM (turning the projector and audio amp on) the small video picture on the SS control screen was a fixed green rectangle. Full screen was OK and I could swap back and forth to full screen (picture) and minimised (green rectangle). All controls including channel change worked. A hard reset fixed the problem and I haven't been able to replicate it.

Overall not a significant improvement over the Spectrum BDA drivers (well done Spectrum!).

Regards
ancall

So what are the differences between Twinhan's BDA and Twinhan's non BDA?

Bye
S.

Ok, I've also tested the drivers but i've got some problems.

renura, do you know if the drivers have hardcoded bandwith?

Hi ZeB,

The drivers are still under development, they were given to me to test.
I believe one of the issues is related to setting the frequency and bandwidth.

However I also know that those drivers appear to be working. using, for example, Showshifter in Australia and in Asia (which have different bandwidth).

I will ask TwinHan about the bandwidth issue. I assume you are trying to use them in Sweden (with Bandwidth 8?)

Cheers

Renura

Yes that's right. 8mhz.

BDA = Broadcast Digital Architecture, it’s a MicroSoft Standard (That’s if MS do actually have a standard other than BOG.) The general idea is that there will be some kind of inter-changeability between card manufactures and software developers. ie one card fits all software and vice versa.

Renura,

Will the new drivers support DVB-T & DVB-S (& DVB-C of course)?

Also do/will they support multiple cards? And if so, a mix of card types?

Thanks

Anthony

Hi AnthonyP69,

Yes, eventually!



No idea - I will ask next time I have the opportunity.

Cheers

Renura

Hi ZeB,

According to Twinhan - the drivers work in Europe - using the 8Mhz bandwidth.

Cheers

Renura

Hi all!

Thanks renura for the drivers and your quick reply!
Guess I'm due some assessment.
Well, here I couldn't get them to work. Not on a freshly installed XP sans any other drivers nor when afterwards I tried to first 'prime the pump', so to speak, by first installing Spectrum's drivers, making some (successful) recording with them on an 8 Mhz bandwidth program, and then switching to the new Twinhan driver. GraphEdit wouldn't render anything on ActiveMovie window and WebScheduler wouldn't find any channel either.
Usual suspect is, of course, that carbon-based unit in front of the monitor, which unfortunately has run out of ideas...

Regards

I can't get it to work either. Black screen in graphedit. Black screen in BDA Sample. This is exactly the same things that happen when you forget to change the bandwidth in Spectrums ini file. That's why I thought it was a bandwith issue.

Hi ZeB, errol,

Have you tried using ShowShifter?

Also remember that the TwinHan driver is only one device file - whereas Spectrum has two device files?

Select each of the Spectrum device files (one at a time) from the device manager and upgrade driver by pointing to the Twinhan one.

It definetely works for some of us:)

Cheers

Renura

So what you're saying is that the single new TwinHan BDA Driver is good to replace both TwinHan's OLD DtvAudio.sys & DtvVideo.sys or if one has been using the Spectrum drivers that would be THTV DVB-t DBA Capture & Tuner Device Drivers.

(The new TwinHan BDA driver is the same for both Tuner and Capture)

that is correct, the single .sys driver file performs both tasks in tuner and capture.

My ShowShifter trial is out of time

This is my device manager:


Does it seem to be OK?


Yes I know, that's why it's so frustrating

Yes

Hi all!

Thanks, renura, for this reminder, there is indeed a small trap lying there, but I did replace both of Spectrum's drivers with the single driver from Twinhan.
Well, ShowShifter, yes of course.
Thing is: so far I dodged buying a new graphics card. Still limping along with that mummy of a Matrox Mystique which doesn't sport such "fancy" (cough) things as an overlay manager or even more than 4 MB of video RAM. It's hardware literally from the last century. I'm surprised I can use it at all. In short: no overlay - no ShowShifter. Sorry I cannot be of any help in that department at present. Just out of curiosity I installed ShowShifter and it recognized the driver, but of course setup came to a screeching halt (which was clear from the start) when it desperately groped in the dark for something to put its video out on.
Thanks for your help, anyway!
I was surprised that the driver prevented WebScheduler from finding any channel, but afterwards found that you could 'coax' Spectrum's driver into the same behaviour on a completely fresh XP install with no prior successful tuning. They seem to be equally clueless in such a situation, which is quite probably the reason why the forceBandwidth hack was resorted to in the first place.

Cheers

To me, ShowShifter doesn't recognize the drivers, my card is not listed in the capture device window.
Any suggestion?

Bye
Simon

Are you using the ShowShifterDVB #2682 beta ?

No, I wasn't.
Now that I installed that ShowShifter beta version I could detect Twinhan's BDA drivers and channel scanning took ages. At the end 0 channels were found!
With VisionDTV i can find 3 channels.
While scanning, some channels were found and scanned but none of them got memorized in the list. Maybe the signal quality was considered too low by ShowShifter even if it's good in VisionDTV.

Bye
S.

I have run with the TwinHan BDA drivers for one week now. I haven't identified any problems that I could pinpoint to the drivers (ie. the same problems occurred prior to upgrade). Picture quality is just as I reported it on 9 September (slightly improved). ShowShifter still freezes or crashes occassionally - almost always when changing chanel.

Imho the set-up Visionplus+XP+SS is still well short of what is required for a useable HTPC.

ancall

renura, when are these drivers going to be generally available?

can someone please send me either the twinhan beta bda-driver set or the spectrum 1.5.3.1 driver set?

I accidentially deleted the latest spectrum driver set and since he cancelled his isp his homepage is gone: so, no spectrum driver to d/l.

please send the driver set to eventim@machers.de.

thank you very much!

DAULSTA

Do you mean officially? I don't know.

I have given them to everyone who has asked me

However I have got very little feedback as to whether they are any good or if there are any bugs etc.

If you tell me that they are good to be released I will ask Twinhan to release them.

Cheers

Renura

I have been using them and they are quite good, I had to alter WS a little bit to get them to work but that was just some signal stats stuff that was not implemented in the TH BDA driver. Apart from that they work very well for me, I have only been using them with WS and not DW but there are other people that have used them with ShowShifter etc.

I think the best thing to do now is ask if you can make then available to everyone as a BETA and put them up on your site for download, or if you want I will put them up on my site for download either way the more people testing them the better.

Thanks.

I will ask and let everyone know what the response is.
Cheers

Renura

I've got a old copy of spectrums site running with the 1.5.3.3 drivers available here
http://nate.dynalias.net/DigitalWatch/file...0BDA%20Drivers/

I tried to use the TW BDA driver but was having difficulties with WS (the finished recording only being the first part of the TV program but with the file creation and save dates/times being those selected in WS) and some hassles switching SS to the new driver. In the end I reverted back the Spectrum's drivers.

Has anyone noticed any significant difference between the TW and Spectrum drivers?

I was unable to tune to any UHF channels for some reason. VHF channels worked fine but with an annoying delay between them.

@ all: Thank you very much for supplying me with the driver sets.

now, I got hold of MCE 2005 a couple of days ahead its release and here's something to report:

running MCE 2005 either with spectrum's 1.5.3.3 or with TwinHan's 1.0.0.2 beta drivers .... MCE won't give me TV.

when trying to configure the TV settings, MCE tells me that the TV tuner ist "not available", a restart of windows should fix this problem, which - of course - it doesn't.

NB: Spectrum's driver AND TwinHan's driver both worked in MCE 2004. The reason why I choose Spectrum's driver over the TwinHan's set is because with the TwinHan's drivers the image quality seems to be a little towards old 848/878 times. The picture isn't that smooth, just as if it was 20fps (TwinHan driver) instead of 30 - 40 fps (Spectrums).

Perhaps someone can me help here ?

Thank you very much in advance..

DAULSTA

p.s. the bandwidth should not be the problem. it is all set to 8KHz.

Ok, I'll bite. This doesn't make any sense. Can you please explain how a driver that deals on a transport stream level can manipulate the framerate of an embedded video stream? And, not effect the audio?

The only possible reason i can think this would happen is if the twinhan drivers are hogging/locking the pci bus, cpu, or memory, which is resulting in the decoded picture not getting to the video card properly. If you're using an AGP video card, then it's not going to be pci related, so that only leaves cpu or memory.

i honestly don't know... but what I know is that live TV isn't that smooth as with the Spectrum driver set. Maybe there is some sort of filtering going on with the TwinHan drivers, i don't know.

fact is: mce 2004 works with both driver sets, whereas mce 2005 declines to support these drivers.

btw: i did a fresh install with no additional pci cards or whatsoever and additionally moved the twinhan card to different pci slots (µatx -> only three available ). It still does not make a difference.

cheers, daulsta

As promised, I have got permission from Twinahn to release the drivers. I have started a nethread here:

http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=2016

Cheers

Renura

That's great news for both the driver section AND MCE 2005 ... of course.

Maybe TwinHan needs a MCE 2005 beta tester? I am up for the task!

email: eventim@machers.de

Thanks again, DAULSTA