Windows 7 video playback looks terrible

[Goose90053]

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and Tivo Desktop 2.8.
Functionally everything works fine.

But the playback quality of the transferred .TiVo files is awful.
It looks like they are not de-interlaced.
Fine horizontal streaks whenever there is movement.

This is a fresh install of Win7 and TD 2.8.
Previously (on the same PC) I had Windows XP and TD 2.7 with beautiful video quality.

[socrplyr]

The files would be the same. So it is something about your setup. It could be what you are playing it in (WMP or TD?), the settings for that player, a video card driver (unlikely), or a codec issue.

[Goose90053]

If I double-click on a .tivo file in Windows Explorer it plays with WMP.
If I play the video from TD it plays with the very same WMP.
So no difference there.

The only other video player I have installed is QuickTime. It does not seem to get involved.

I installed the Shark007 codecs but that did not help.

So how do I troubleshoot codec issues?

[TolloNodre]

The files would be the same. So it is something about your setup. It could be what you are playing it in (WMP or TD?), the settings for that player, a video card driver (unlikely), or a codec issue.

Actually the first thing I would think of is the video card driver if it works fine in XP but not Windows 7. The weakest link in a new windows release is always the drivers since the manufacturers are slow to release them.

I'd go to your video card's website and see if they have drivers available for Windows7. If not, go back to XP until they do.

[Goose90053]

I have an Nvidia Geforce 8800 Ultra. I was running the latest WHQL driver and I just tried the latest beta. No difference.

I have plenty of video files of various .avi, .mov, .mpeg, .mp4, etc. flavors. They all play back with superb quality. It is only the .tivo files that look bad.

The .tivo files are huge. A 30-minute episode of "The Big Bang Theory" at 1080i is 3.5GB. I would expect the quality of that to be spectacular.

[ggieseke]

Have you checked out the codec utility in the sticky at the top of this forum?

[Goose90053]

Hi Greg,

Yes, I had tried it, but I could not open the help file (even after downloading the Microsoft add-on that is supposed to enable support for .hlp files in Windows 7) so I kind of gave up on it.

But I tried again and also found the .doc help you supplied later in the sticky thread.

So my problem seems to be that the video decoder is "Microsoft DTV-DVD" and I can't set it to anything else.

The only other video decoder listed is "ffdshow". If I select that it just ends up as a box at the bottom of the tree, disjoint from the demultiplexer.
(I can attach the ffdshow audio decoder no problem.)

I do have Tivo Desktop Plus (paid) version 2.8 installed. Should I be seeing some other decoder listed as an option?

[ggieseke]

If you have 2.8 Plus, set all 3 settings in TDCM to (none). In 2.8 they don't register the Plus (MainConcept) codecs with Windows at all, so TDCM can't see them but the TiVo DirectShow Source Filter will build them into the filter graph unless you override it.

When you open a .TiVo file in TDCM you should see the MainConcept Demuxer and A/V codecs. They work great for me, but I don't have any HD files to test with. If you still get bad quality I would take a look at the video acceleration settings in WMP.

[Goose90053]

I set everything back to "(none)" and opened a .TiVo file and saw "MainConcept" everywhere! And now the video quality is fixed!

Sure enough, I play a file from TD and the quality is fixed.

I have no idea what I did but my problem is solved. Thanks!

[Goose90053]

Arrrrrrgh! The bad quality is back! WTF? I didn't do anything.

No amount of TDCM fiddling fixes it, even though MainConcept seems to be installed correctly.

Help!

[gcawad]

Same for me, only I'm using Windows 7 32 bit, whenever there is movement it seems to jerk and breakup. I didn't notice it when using the Beta RC7 and 2.62. I think I'll try going back to 2.62 and see if that fixes it.

[gcawad]

Finally got time to readdress this issue. TD 2.62 is what I used during the Windows RC7 Beta, by going back to TD 2.62 the choppy, streaking video was FIXED.

[Dan203]

Yeah I get the same thing with TD 2.8. I actually reported it to TiVo as a bug, but they apparently never bothered fixing it. :(

Dan

[TiVo Fool]

Any new solutions on this issue or is the only fix to drop back to TD 2.6.2?

BTW, I only see this with 1080i transfers, 720p shows playback fine.

[TiVo Fool]

Well, I spent an hour on the phone with TiVo Customer Service who was no help at all. They had me install a bunch of worthless codecs and refused to acknowledge that this is TiVo's problem to fix. They even suggested that I change my operating system because Windows 7 64-bit is "not supported" and basically hung up on me. Ridiculous!

So I removed TD 2.8, installed v2.7 and sure enough, the problem went away. I was able to confirm that the MainConcept codecs were not registered in v2.8 using Ggieseke's Codec Utility (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=6855202#post6855202). After I installed v2.7 the codecs were there.

Goose90053, this probably seems intermittent because you are playing files with different formats. This is definitely a deinterlacing issue because I only see it with 1080i transfers (NBC, CBS), not 720p shows (ABC, FOX).

I hope a fix is going to be in the next release. Very frustrating!

[Goose90053]

Thanks for the effort, TiVo Fool. You have more patience than me.

I just checked and can confirm that it is only the 1080i shows that exhibit the problem.

[moyekj]

A workaround to the issue is decrypt .TiVo file to .mpg and then you can use whatever player/codecs you want that have proper deinterlace capabilities.

[TiVo Fool]

So 2.8.1 fixes it! It also seems to fix my auto-transfer problems.

TiVo: you need to be little more timely in your support of new operating system versions. It's been over a year since Windows 7 was available for developers to look at.