Hi everyone, my first post here.
I have been playing with Vista buid 5308 on an average spec system and
have got a bit stuck with Media Center.
Oh first off please don't tell me to get more RAM or trivial stuff like
that; give me numbers and facts and I'll decide. From what I've seen
vista's media center shares a lot from xp media center, so I'm hoping
someone here will have some info to help piece things together.

Anyway; doing anything in windows media player is fine, watching divx,
dvd, etc.
Try to do the same things in media center and it's slow as a dog, with
no visible high resource usage, still plenty of resources left for
other processes, which I can prove by using other apps or games at the
same time.

Watching a divx for example;
WMP - ~90% cpu (Normal priority).
Media Center - eh*.exe ~60% cpu (Normal priority), and wmplayer.exe ~1%
cpu.

I assume media center spawns wmp to play the video, but appears to
throttle it. Changing priorities has no affect. But my system still
have plenty of power left for other tasks.

So I thought video card drivers or codecs, but surely all the same
stuff would be used in media center and wmp (since media center spawns
the wmplayer.exe process anyway)?

Any ideas greatly appreciated, I've finished brainstorming with myself
and getting noisey results Googling =8-)
Already read some interesting stuff on this group so thanks to
everyone.

James

Very intresting assesment James, however you have not provided us with
enough info.
how fast is the machine, how much ram, disk space and type (IDE or SATA),
type of PVR please?

Media Center does share some attributes of WMP but it's not the same thing.
my knee jerk reaction is if it plays well in WMP and not in MCE, then it's a
codec.

and what exactly are you having slowness with? Divx? DVD's? how about
live TV and recording or playing back live TV? these will help trouble
shoot your issues.

I could understand issues with DIVX because of mediacenter/divx codec
issues. are these Divx stored on a network share or local to the machine.
if network, how fast is your connection and if local, is it on the system
drive or a secondary, or on a disk (cd/dvd)?
have you tried a real DVD that one would buy from the store?

Just to give you an idea, i'm using 2.8ghz maching with 2 gigs of ram and i
idol at 900mb (with mediacenter running but just at the home screen with
nothing playing). if you are paging alot your disk may be a bottleneck.

I've been using Vista MediaCenter for over a month now and have worked out
soooooooo many kinks i can't even describe. it's finally running the way i
feel it should, PERFECTLY!

Murph

ps, sorry for asking so many questions! just trying to help.

<james.laugesen@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1142943567.457654.288120@z34g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...

<james.laugesen@gmail.com> wrote
Keep in mind this is also a beta product and there are specific newsgroups
that are monitored by MS where you can get support.

Brian

If you're a legitimate beta tester, you should post this on the beta
newsgroups. Chances are it's already been logged as a bug. If you're not
legitimate, well, rest assured it is a beta (some would even say alpha) and
it should be all better by release time.

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

<james.laugesen@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1142943567.457654.288120@z34g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...

<james.laugesen@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1142943567.457654.288120@z34g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...
From what I understand of Vista, it requires a PCI 3D card with 256MB in
order to be able to run all of the new "goodies". If you have the new UI
features turned on and are using an underpowered video card, I would expect
a slowdown.

-Pete

Thanks for the replies everyone, esspecially Murph for your detail
I am a legitimate beta tester and will discuss there once I've learnt a
bit more about media center; I'm not aware of any other Vista users
reporting problems with media center.

I see the wmplayer.exe process is spawned when I use media center,
however it's CPU usage always remains very low.

Machine is:
XP Athlon 1800+ so that's clocked 1.4ghz I think.
2gb ram, ddr @ 266 dual channel (4 x 512).
Nvidia geforce4 video, 128mb I think.
2 x 250gb SATA (8mb buffer western digital in hardware stripe array on
crappo silicon image pci controller).
TV tuner is a Twinhan VisionPlus DVB-t (Using BDA driver, required to
work with media center).
So it's no spring chicken, but is still running vista very well now,
apart from media center, hahaha.

I can watch anything in wmp fine, and watch digital tv in twinhan's
crap app also fine.

Bit more detail for media center playback:
mpeg - fine, though I have not tried very high quality (only VCD
quality).
wmv - fine, average 'net quality, the usually car crashes, bikes doing
wheelies, etc.
divx - ripped dvd at 720x576 "average" quality, audio plays smooth for
first few seconds until video displays, from then on audio and video is
jerky, in about 1 second 'skips'.
live tv - jerky also

I have not tried recorded tv or dvd, I'll do that tonight.

What really has me stumped is that there's not a heap of load on the
system, I can quite happily jump around doing other stuff while a divx
jerks along in the background in media center... what I have not done
though, is tried to watch another divx at the same time in wmp, I'll
try that too haha.

Cheers everyone
James

Update: DVD playback is fine, lower quality AVI's (not divx) also fine.
Recorded TV is jerky, exactly the same as live tv.

So live tv and divx are the problems... certainly looks like lack of
processing power, but there's plenty of power left to do other things
at the same time, like play around in photoshop, visual studio, etc. So
that doesn't make sense.

What does divx and my digital tv format (is it transport stream TS or
whatever?) have in common? Apart from cpu intensive decoding.

J

Trust me, there's plenty of problems with Media Center reported on the beta
newsgroups. Many of us can't get live TV to work at all. Just gotta hit the
right newsgroup <g>.

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"J" <james.laugesen@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1143005591.520286.244290@j33g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...

James, thanks for the details of the machine as it is important. and as you
said your workstation is no spring chicken, with the exception of the video
card. as you may already know Vista likes 256mb on the video but 128 will
work fine.

Incidently Twinhan VisionPlus DVB-t is not listed on the 'supported' tuner
card list which could be the cause of your Live TV problem.(as you know, you
are dealing with a beta product). however this isn't a common link betweek
LiveTV and Divx

as far as wmplayer.exe goes, i have 2 things to discuss.
1. when i first built my mediacenter 2005 (i know differnt product but could
be relavent) i opened WMP and by default assosciated all video extention
types with WMP (this is after i set up mediacenter side of things). well
let me tell you, that machine was never the same again! problem after
problem after problem.
My solution was to simply create another user and log in as him and NOT
launch WMP. it worked!

2. I noticed on my Vista Media Center that when playing Live TV or WMV files
that wmplayer.exe process did NOT spawn.

I didn't test Divx because i don't feel that there is a good Divx decoder
for Vista yet. if anyone out there can point me in the right direction, i'd
appreicate but don't want to install something built for XP on Vista.

let me know how things go,
Murph


"J" <james.laugesen@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1143005591.520286.244290@j33g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...

correct, lots of issues, but nothing that can't be worked out.
i've reported plenty of bugs to microsoft already and i trust they are aware
of some of these already. if not, well htey are now and will hopefully
address these issues before the release.

"Dana Cline - MVP" <dcline@scriptpro.com> wrote in message
news:OH1vyabTGHA.4740@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...

Please continue this thread in the appropriate beta newsgroup.

--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


"Murph" <dailyjibjab@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:O%23tsPkbTGHA.4956@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...

Unfortunately there is no Vista MediaCenter thread.

this is a media center problem so i'd imagine this is the next best thing.


"Todd Bowra [MSFT]" <toddbow@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:ufH1M4dTGHA.196@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...

microsoft.beta.longhorn.mce.general, as well as a handful of others...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

"Murph" <dailyjibjab@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:ua4mPOeTGHA.1688@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...