Guys,

I've been away for a while, but moving interstate can play havoc with your life. Still sorting things out at home so no broadband at the moment (writing this from work).

Anyway, tried the beta driver from Twinhan but I found it crashed my system periodically. I thought I'd have another look at my driver set remembering they were'nt that crash hot either.

As an upside to being busy doing other things I've been able to clear my mind of driver writing and approach it now with a fresh outlook. I understand the whole BDA thing much more thoroughly now so I went through and rewrote a good deal of the code on the weekend and it performs a whole lot better.

I still don't have anywhere to host a download but if there's enough interest from you guys I'll see what I can do to make the new version available.

Let me know.

Spectrum

[Edit] Forgot to mention my latest production box is MCE2005 so I'm using my drivers daily.

Definitely interested! Those Twinhan drivers are no way near production quality and I am in a desperate need for BDA drivers in MCE 2005. It will be great if you can provide them!

YES PLEASE!!!! if you send me the driver pack i can host it no problemo!

Greets, DAULSTA

Is it just me, or is it good to have the real BDA Driver author back?

Welcome back Spectrum

He lives!!!

If you need some hosting for those drivers - please PM me.... more than happy to host a small index.html and a BDA driver zip.....

Thanks to everyone for all the offers to host. This community never ceases to amaze me!

I've found some temporary space to hold the drivers so feel free to grab a copy and rehost if you can.

bda_drivers_1.6.0.zip

Thanks to all,

Spectrum

For those who don't know what they're doing I've added the new drivers to spectrum's original page i grabbed on the 8th of May. It's a bit out of date now, but it should give you the rough idea.

http://nate.dynalias.net/THDTV/

I downloaded the driver, and followed through nate's guide, but i still cant get it to work. Could someone please give me some tips please? Thanks

[Edit:]
On second attempt, I managed to get it to work in digitalwatch. Could anyone get it to work under Media Center in MCE 2005??

And, of course, thanks Spectrum for your continuous effort into these drivers. Reckon Twinhan should employ you to write drivers for them!

U rock, man! Thanx a bunch for all ur great work

>> NiCK <<

Spectrum,

is a dual tuner setup possible with your driver set?

thanks and welcome back,

DAULSTA

Well I thought they were performing quite well already!

Looking forward to trying the latest version. Thanks.

DAULSTA,

It was last time I looked but I'm not running two cards at the moment myself.

Spectrum

Wow, good news, we have spectrum "reloaded".

Spectrum please give a programming lesson to twinhan boys (again )


Have you seen this ?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&DisplayLang=en

I think can be useful.

Oh, thanks to The Solutor. I am new comer
Your direct link here

i'v been having having audio & video stuttering problems with these drivers. the don't appear to be any pattern, but the duration between the stalls are very short (few seconds). i didn't have this problems with the previous drivers. i just reverted back to the 1.5.3.3 drivers to be sure and the problem went away.

I have the exact same problem as you bionicdonkey

Great to see Spectrum back at the forum and with goodies

even if they have a minor glitch but hopefuly not for long.

I have the same problem with stuttering on all channels in DW using the open source mpeg2 decoder. When I changed the decoder to cyberlink one the stuittering was gone.

I also put my system (Athlon64/3400/1GB) through stress test where I simultaneously started recording in WS, copying two 6GB ISO files between the drives, mounted another dvd ISO as virtual drive from which PowerDVD played the movie and finally used Nero Digital to extract main movie into nrg file. The above actions were running OK for about 10 minutes and then I got Windows crash (blue screen) in thbdacap.sys.

I've also made several recordings with WS under "normal" computer use and haven't encountered any problems.

I'm running 1.5.2.1 Spectrum drivers and they're perfect. No problems at all.

At last a Spectrum BDA driver that doesn't lock up the PCI buss DMA.
This saves lots of time when one doesn't have keep rebooting their pc when trying to debug DVB programs. It also seems to scan the correct freq's unlike some other BDA drivers out there. Works ok using two VP cards with WS, also seems to make the BDA DW work that much better.

Its been a long time to wait for this, but i'm glad its here now. Thanks again Spectrum, welcome back and thanks for the presents.

Dan.

so you haven't had the same problems some of us have been having?

bionicdonkey,



No, Sorry.

All working very well so far, tried a few different video decoders on DW, overlay mixer is now working very well with the new drivers, no more DW lockups.

I'm using P4P800S ASUS MB, 1GRam, ATI9600XT256MB, 2xVP DTV, 2x200GBHD, hyperthreaded.

Just installed these drivers with MCE 2005 and 2 VP cards, so far they are working great

I gave them a go but experienced minor stuttering. Great effort though!

Looks like it could be packets being dropped on slow or heavily loaded systems. Lazy coding on my part I guess. I'll work on it tonight or tomorrow.

Spectrum

What about three cards? Is there any limit?

I am thinking of purchasing a third but I would love to know whether it is going to work before I buy

Paul

The limit is normally available IRQ's. 3 card's is certainly possible but I've never tried 3 * VisionPlus.

Sorry this isn't in a proper release format.
thbdacap.zip
Just drop thbdacap.sys into \windows\system32\drivers over your 1.6 copy and reboot.

Created a FIFO queue to keep track of filled frames rather than just remembering the last one. The nature of things meant that sometimes multiple frames would fill up before AVStream would go looking to use them and so only see the very last one. I.E., any earlier ones would be missed resulting in stuttering. I guess it was more of a problem for slower systems but like I said, it was lazy on my part.

As always please test and let me know how it goes.

Spectrum

Welcome back Spectrum........... no broadband, i feel your pain

New version seems great.

I had been using 1.5.3.1 as 1.5.3.3 would see BSOD if DW crashed while using it (not instantly but shortly after the BSOD would occur). The issue with 1.5.3.1 was that sometimes it did not stream the data, which is OK for WS as it would try again, but DW would result in just a blank screen sometimes on channel change.

This latest version seems to stream data all the time, no blank screens in DW, and with some stuiply made constant channel flicking i managed to get DW to crash and, so far no BSOD.

Well done, thanks.

problem solved...thanks spectrum

Spectrum, welcome back & thanks.

1.6.0 drivers with twin TH cards in MCE2005 scanned quickly and found 2, 7, 9 and 10 but not SBS.

I'm using onboard (soundmax) SPDIF on an ASUS P4C800-E direct to my receiver.

WS still works well, and the audio sync with DW that always used to be a problem with the 1.5.3.3 drivers is gone.

Also, with the 1.5.3.3 drivers DW would occasionally fail to output audio for a channel where I had it set up that the default channel for a network was defined with an AC3 stream. I had to shift to an MPEG channel and back to the AC3 channel after changing networks to get sound. This problem is gone with the 1.6.0 drivers.

Unfortunately, MCE outputs sound fine when it first starts, but changing a channel causes the receiver to turn off it's dolby digital indicator, and turn on its PCM indicator, and no sound. Bugger.

Timeshifting (and ff and rewind) work really well under MCE - except for the fact that when timeshifting there is no sound.

I'll try the latest drop and see how it goes - perhaps the audio problems are related to dropped frames that you've addressed with the FIFO buffer.

Cheers

BJ

BJReplay,

I'd be surprised if you're getting Dolby Digital with live tv through MCE. PCM would be correct though.

As for not tuning SBS - that's an lower level problem that Microsoft will have to patch. The list of UHF frequencies that are tuned when scanning seem to be hard coded to European frequencies. You can always go through the nonsense of editing psisdecd.dll to put valid frequencies in for yourself.

Spectrum

Yeah, we can't expect the likes of "little" guys like Microsoft, Divco, TwinHan etc to match the sheer resources, team of software engineers that Spectrum, Null and Nate have..... sheesh hehe

MS etc should be damn right embarassed

Spectrum,

Dunno why, but the only time I get sound out of MCE, the dolby digital light turns on on my receiver. Soon as I change channels, the DD light goes out, and the PCM light goes on, and there is no audible output.

On the Nine HD loop, I get the DD light, but no sound.

Time for some googling, registry hacking and SDK reading methinks.

One thing I've noticed is a file called MCETuningOverrides.xml (it's in MEDIACTR.CAB on CD2, and ends up in Windows or Windows\System32. There's a reference to in in the registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Media Center... (forgot, back at my desk now), and it looks well hackable to allow scanning for SBS.

BJ

hi as my name suggests, im kind of new to all this
and i was wondering if these drivers also work with DVB-s cards and MCE05. also, i live in europe. i dont know if this makes any difference though

tia

Not yet

do the original BDA drivers work for DVB-s (those posted in the sticky thread)?

Spectrum's original 3rd party BDA drivers do not work with DVB-S cards. I believe that TwinHan plan to support all ~ their current products with the BDA drivers they are developing. This will be of limited value until Microsoft finishes writing the BDA Architecture... (Whilst there is support for DVB-S. The is currently no support for Conditional Access CAM / Card's)

What is the current procedure for updateing to the latest BDA drivers?
Where do I find the drivers?
Can I install them the normal way through the device manager?

thanks in advance,
Paul

There is no fixed productre that I'm aware of. It's still all beta


Renura posted a link to them in this forum not so long along


Yup

I should have been more clear... I am after Spectrum's drivers not the twinhan produced ones. Renura hasn't posted a link to them has he?

Paul

No but Spectrum has I'll restrain myself, the link is in this thread

They are here bda_drivers_1.6.0

ps - this link is posted on the first page of this thread

And then an update to them, also in this thread
http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?show...=15&#entry21049

Thanks guys, that is what I was after

Paul

Yes


http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=2182

Cheers

Renura

Guys,

upgrade and patch seemed to work well except I've lost channel 7!!
Any ideas?

Thanks....

rdm,



Have you rebooted?, and what frequency Ch 7 are you using? and what application?

Hi,
I've been trying out version 1.6 of the BDA drivers with my Twinham DVB-T card. Unfortunately I've had to revert back to version 1.5.3 due to some rather severe crashes that I get when I use WebScheduler BDA version 2.9.3.3 to record some programs from out of standby. On the two occasions I did the above, I had a "stop error screen" which seems to have been caused by the new driver. I haven't had these problems with the older version of the driver.

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
...

Techincal information:

*** STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xF8B7ADE4)

*** thbdacap.sys - Address F8B7ADE4 base at F8B7A000, DateStamp 41948da3

...

I have kept hold of the debug files that Windows created on the following boot (manifest.txt, Mini111204-01.dmp and sysdata.xml) if anyone would find them interesting.

Anthony