XP or Vista for a HTPC, any recommendations?

[akej]

Hi.

I´m planning to reinstall my HTPC, but I´m unsure if I should use XP or Vista to get the best playback (using XP today, FFDShow, MPC HC, Haali Render).

I have read the different threads where this subject has been discussed, but I haven't found any clear recommendation on this. I think many people would appreciate to get some guidelines in choosing the right OS for a HTPC, to get the best playback possible (using ReClock).

As far as I have understood, choosing Vista will give some more alternatives when selecting a renderer as well better "anti tearing options"...? Any other advantages/drawbacks when comparing XP and Vista?

Best regards,
Akej

 

[leeperry]

I've never had any tearing on XP(except on regular EVR), so I can't really tell.

Vista has 2 major advantages :

-Aero forces the VSYNC to behave, as the whole windows desktop is now D3D(it helps a lot with Haali's Renderer/EVR/VMR9 Renderless, that tend to behave poorly on XP)

-it supports HPET, that is far more accurate than the legacy timers supported by XP...it seems to help Reclock synchronising faster.

*BUT* Vista comes with tons of crapware, is n00b-friendly(for instance my ATI drivers keep asking me whether I'm sure each time I switch from one output to the other, it's VERY annoying...on XP it asks once and that's it!)

Vista is good...if you can cope with all the bloat that is

Reclock works amazingly well with VMR7/VMR9 Windowless in ZP6 on XP....and also w/ custom EVR in MPC HC on Vista I heard.

to make XP act a bit more nicely w/ Reclock, you can add this to your boot.ini :

/NOEXECUTE=ALWAYSOFF /FASTDETECT /USEPMTIMER /NODEBUG /TIMERES=9766

 

[akej]

Hi, thanks for the info!

I have only been using MPC HC until now, but I have seen a lot of discussion about ZP 6, is that player the way to go when using XP, VMR9 and ReClock...?

Also, I tried to Google on the timer settings you recommended, but I' not sure I understand exacly what it does. Would you please give a short explanantion on these settings, and if there are any drawbacks chaning this, perhaps depending on CPU...?

 

[leeperry]

well MPC HC works fine in custom EVR/VMR9 on Vista w/ Reclock, but on XP you have to enable D3DFS otherwise it drops frames after a while..

ZP6 works like a charm for me in VMR9 Windowless@48Hz.

the VSYNC sits on the top of the visible picture, and doesn't move at all till the end of the movie

about the tweaks :

/USEPMTIMER, sets the windows timer to the motherboard ACPI clock(more reliable than the CPU clock, thanks James for the tip!)

/TIMERES=9766, been using it for a while...on my system it enables Reclock to reach 0.17ppm when using the PM timer.
it seems to increase the system timer granularity

 

[Mark_A_W]

Anyone got Powerstrip working on Vista?

It's like it's in "demo" mode for me. All the controls are there, but nothing actually affects the monitor.

Monitor is running at 85hz, the windows/Ati CCC setting. But Powerstrip thinks it's 96hz.


What's really weird is Reclock thinks it's 96hz too.



Lee, disable the UAC, and then disable the UAC nag in the Security Centre.

 

[leeperry]

I did disable the UAC.

the only trouble-free way to switch monitors for me is to set a hotkey in the ATi drivers...but then I got 2 resident apps permanently

doing it w/ the windows display manager always ends up in nagging me "are you sure blabla"

well pstrip doesn't work if the CCC scaler is not enabled.

for instance I can't change the freq of my secondary monitor if CCC didn't "recognize" it....meaning if you switch res/freq w/ CCC, then pstrip should work.

what's your graphic card anyway ? HD4xxx support is very poor at this time.

 

[Mark_A_W]

HD2600XT

What's the CCC scaler?

 

[leeperry]

well CCC needs to be aware that the display is here for pstrip to be able to mess w/ it

disable the secondary display, force any refresh rate in CCC, now open pstrip...that should work.

otherwise Rik Wang on the official forum has a solution for you I'm sure

 

[Mark_A_W]

I got Vista working properly last night - Rik helped me fix my Powerstrip issue.

It was beautiful.

Smooth playback with whichever renderer I picked. Really easy. Much much easier than getting it all working with XP.

The reclock tearing test line was just gliding along without the slightest hickup.



Then I turned the second monitor on (I use a multi monitor setup).

And it all fell to pieces. Jerky, horrid, crap. Turned Aero on and off, played around a bit...nup.

My XP setup is just as smooth as Vista was for a single display, so I guess I'm back to XP. It was just so easy to obtain on Vista.

If you only plan on running on running a single display, I'd go Vista32. Everything just works, even the out of the box vista drivers for my tuner cards.

From my experience, once you disable UAC, Vista is really good.

 

[Vertigo1]

Presume all of this Vista talk is using HTPC apps and players other than VMC? ReClock on VMC still a total no-go?

 

[Mark_A_W]

I use Zoom Player 6.

 

[Momber]

Well, I finally ditched Vista and rolled back time by restoring a five month old (!) Ghost image labelled "XP PDVD_7.3 perfect".
And what a nice HTPC-OS XP is in comparison to Vista! It's so much faster, feels so much more responsive and does exactly what it's supposed to do with respect to HTPC use, after a minimal amount of tweaking.
I had endless trouble in Vista with audio being noticeably out of snyc (at least ~200-300 ms) on nearly all my BluRay remuxes. I had initially suspected possible muxing errors by tsMuxeR, particularly with TrueHD, to be the cause, until I noticed the problem was also apparent in "simple" remuxes that contained only regular Dolby Digital 5.1, and in other HD files (not BluRay).
So I rolled back to XP et voilà - the same files are perfectly in sync!!!! So forget Vista once and for all!
Granted, VMR9 renderless may be 0.05% less sharp than EVR but what is it good for when the video is lagging up to half a second? And that's with DXVA and a CPU usage of less than 50% (of which 35% is ReClock 1.8.2.2 - which I updated along with latest drivers and other software - resampling with "Very Good" setting) and half my RAM still free!
It feels really good to be using XP again. It starts faster, shuts down faster, loads programs faster, playback of PowerDVD and ZoomPlayer starts sooner after clicking play, heck, even the response of my network feels faster.
The feeling is like when you had a nagging chest cold for about two weeks and one day you suddenly wake up and realize you're healthy again Bloody great!
Mind you, MPC HC isn't worth much under XP, its DXVA still doesn't work right (never really has but seems to gradually improve. ATi Radeon 3650 here btw), but then again there is ZoomPlayer, which works just fine with Cyberlink filters .
Perhaps the people who seem to like Vista have QuadCore CPUs and RAM in excess of 3 GB... I surely don't. And even then XP would be much faster still.

 

[Jong]

Very interesting thanks. Every now and again I wonder if it might be worth moving to Vista, but in my saner moments I know I will not. Maybe Window 7, maybe!

Mind you, MPC HC isn't worth much under XP, its DXVA still doesn't work right (never really has but seems to gradually improve. ATi Radeon 3650 here btw)

In what way? Seems to work fine here with XP-SP3, the June full release of MPC-HC and every Cat driver I have used (currently 8.10).

 

[Mark_A_W]

Well, I finally ditched Vista and rolled back time by restoring a five month old (!) Ghost image labelled "XP PDVD_7.3 perfect".
And what a nice HTPC-OS XP is in comparison to Vista! It's so much faster, feels so much more responsive and does exactly what it's supposed to do with respect to HTPC use, after a minimal amount of tweaking.
I had endless trouble in Vista with audio being noticeably out of snyc (at least ~200-300 ms) on nearly all my BluRay remuxes. I had initially suspected possible muxing errors by tsMuxeR, particularly with TrueHD, to be the cause, until I noticed the problem was also apparent in "simple" remuxes that contained only regular Dolby Digital 5.1, and in other HD files (not BluRay).
So I rolled back to XP et voilà - the same files are perfectly in sync!!!! So forget Vista once and for all!
Granted, VMR9 renderless may be 0.05% less sharp than EVR but what is it good for when the video is lagging up to half a second? And that's with DXVA and a CPU usage of less than 50% (of which 35% is ReClock 1.8.2.2 - which I updated along with latest drivers and other software - resampling with "Very Good" setting) and half my RAM still free!
It feels really good to be using XP again. It starts faster, shuts down faster, loads programs faster, playback of PowerDVD and ZoomPlayer starts sooner after clicking play, heck, even the response of my network feels faster.
The feeling is like when you had a nagging chest cold for about two weeks and one day you suddenly wake up and realize you're healthy again Bloody great!
Mind you, MPC HC isn't worth much under XP, its DXVA still doesn't work right (never really has but seems to gradually improve. ATi Radeon 3650 here btw), but then again there is ZoomPlayer, which works just fine with Cyberlink filters .
Perhaps the people who seem to like Vista have QuadCore CPUs and RAM in excess of 3 GB... I surely don't. And even then XP would be much faster still.

Interesting.

I had the opposite experience. The new Vista build is 10x better than the new XP build (unless you run two monitors in Vista, then the video stutters).

But yes, I do have an overclocked Quadcore and 4GB ram.

And Vista, even with Aero enabled, didn't seem slow at all

 

[Momber]

In what way?

Video frames flicking back and forth, video playback suddenly stops (freezes) while audio continues and so forth. That's with both H.264 and VC-1. Catalyst 8.10.

 

[Clams]

I've never had a problem with ANYTHING under XP-Pro.
Anytime I think about "upgrading" to Vista, I ask myself exactly *why* I should want (or need) to do so. I've yet to find a compelling answer.

-W

 

[Jong]

You do hear good reports every now and again about Vista having smoother video playback. It may be true in an ideal world, but you also hear the reverse. Many of the 'good' reports I think are because of a clean installation, rather than Vista per se. A clean install of XP SP3 may well have achieved the same result.

 

[Mark_A_W]

Yes and No.

I have a clean build of XP SP3 and a clean build of Vista on my PC.


Vista was 100x easier to get *really* smooth playback - it just worked in ZP. Aero was enabled. Basically all renderers were smooth and there was no tearing.


But, once I turned on the second monitor, it all fell into a heap, and my careful, hand crafted, XP setup is smoother in a multi monitor setup. (VMR7 with reclock v-sync enabled is best for me, although others get different results.)

 

[Jong]

Actually I do agree that its easier to get acceptable playback on Vista. However, many of us have spent a couple of years or more getting, as you say, "hand-crafted" playback on XP SP3. Having done that its doubtful that very many of us will benefit from a move to Vista. At least, as you found, once the initial buzz has worn off, a whole host of "little" kinks will emerge that will take the best part of another year to iron out!

I know we will have to move sometime, but as Vista has only a year or so left to run and XP support will last way beyond that, I think I will skip it!

 

[sanderh]

I m reading a lot about this Aero thing? What is this and what and the goods?