Converting a Philips Showline 9350i to Digital TV (DVB) and Vista
I just picked up one of these great media center PC's off of ebay for £200. Unfortunately they have dual analogue tuners which are nigh on useless these days. Therefore I went to Maplin and picked up a USB dual tuner DVB TV adapter (K-world 399U I think) for £40.
I plugged it in but couldn't get XP Media center to work with it so I decided to install Vista.
Firstly I backed up the partitions using Acronis True Image Home. This was very important as the 9350i does not come with any recovery media!
I then added another 1GB of RAM to the 9350i as Vista is notoriously memory hungry. It takes standard DDR2 RAM (533Mhz or faster preferred but I used 400Mhz and it worked fine).
I installed vista and everything worked fine apart from three things:
1. No sound. The sound did not work initially. It took me ages to get it working....eventually I found that backup I took very useful as on the original C drive of the install there is a folder called Philips and in there was drivers for all the hardware. The audio driver in there was the only one I could find that worked so don't lose them!
2. Stuttering picture on live TV. I googled this and found the answer to be that Microsoft's Vista bundled MPEG2 decoder sucks. I downloaded NVidia's PureVideo decoder, rebooted and everything worked perfectly! You need to use this tool to change the default codec: link
3. Front Panel display says "Starting Up" constantly. I haven't fixed this problem yet. The drivers/program for this did not install properly on Vista. Anyone got any ideas?
Pictures to follow....
Update (Thanks to Ronald):
Vista drivers are here! : http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/dcbint/get?url=/sca/sca/070314/070314170811_18207.zip&ofn=Vista drivers.zip
I plugged it in but couldn't get XP Media center to work with it so I decided to install Vista.
Firstly I backed up the partitions using Acronis True Image Home. This was very important as the 9350i does not come with any recovery media!
I then added another 1GB of RAM to the 9350i as Vista is notoriously memory hungry. It takes standard DDR2 RAM (533Mhz or faster preferred but I used 400Mhz and it worked fine).
I installed vista and everything worked fine apart from three things:
1. No sound. The sound did not work initially. It took me ages to get it working....eventually I found that backup I took very useful as on the original C drive of the install there is a folder called Philips and in there was drivers for all the hardware. The audio driver in there was the only one I could find that worked so don't lose them!
2. Stuttering picture on live TV. I googled this and found the answer to be that Microsoft's Vista bundled MPEG2 decoder sucks. I downloaded NVidia's PureVideo decoder, rebooted and everything worked perfectly! You need to use this tool to change the default codec: link
3. Front Panel display says "Starting Up" constantly. I haven't fixed this problem yet. The drivers/program for this did not install properly on Vista. Anyone got any ideas?
Pictures to follow....
Update (Thanks to Ronald):
Vista drivers are here! : http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/dcbint/get?url=/sca/sca/070314/070314170811_18207.zip&ofn=Vista drivers.zip
posted by James White at 10:45 am
39 comments
