choppy video feed

[shane5825]

I am almost ready to give up with the whole HTPC idea. Brief summary:
New house I wired with cat 5 before dryawall. Desktop upstairs in office with 750 gig of storage, gig ram blablabla. Finished basement with 96 inch EDTV projector and screen with surround. I put a Dell Inspiron 8000 (XP Pro) with a WinTV PVR-USB2 connected to it. I save the files onto my desktop via cat 5 100mps for the storage space. I can capture with the WinTV hardware and playback with Windows Media Player or watch live TV through WinTV software perfectly. The feed is great and very smooth. I hate the software, no bells and whistles! I tried Media Portal and was excited with the features, but the feed was very sluggish both in live tv and recorded shows. Can someone please help me. Do you think XLobby will be better? Am I wasting my time with the laptop idea?

[BaddaBing]

The first thing you need to know is that Xlobby does not have any built-in video or audio play/record features. Video playback - whether its DVD movies or recorded tv - is all done via third party applications. So one option is to find a playback engine whose performance you like and integrate it into the Xlobby front end. You can search through the forum threads to find what other people have done and which integrations have already been built or you can do the integration yourself. Keep in mind, that while Xlobby is very full featured - it is still essentially beta software that requires a fair amount of technical ability in order to get the most out of it. You may want to take a look at this thread http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3147 as its a skin that has been designed to integrage Sage TV and may be of interest to you.

[shane5825]

After I posted, I spent some more time investigating and realized that xlobby would not playback. This may be better because WMP has been the only thing so far to play error free. Off the top of your head, do you know if anyone has integrated WMP and/or WinTV?

[BaddaBing]

I think that most of the skins by the French Xlobby team utilize Windows Media Player. Here is a link to one of their translated skins http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2988

You can find the french forum here: http://forums.studio-biorythm.com

[C-moi]

sorry
we use MPC : Media Player Classic and not WMP : Windows Media Player
MPC can read streaming video, DVD, real video format, qucik time video ... karaoke video : it is free