Everyone has heard of the Hot Coffee controversy courtesy of a modification to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that allowed you to have “sex” with a pixilated nude woman in the game. It was retarded, as Maddox pointed out, because it is a freaking game where you run around and steal cars and shoot police. To claim that the worst part of the game is the terrible sex scene really says quite a few things about the American value system.

Thankfully, a nerdy role-playing game called Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has outdone the stupid Hot Coffee crap. In a nod to realistic gameplay, the designers have left in skins and models for females that include *gasp* breasts. The default game covers *gasp* breasts with a default bra or whatever that thing is that covers them. So what do you think one of the first mods released is? Of course, the topless mod!

The caveat? Well kids were complaining they cant see their electronic breasts immediately after loading their modification. See, the women still have clothes on as they walk around the game world. Anger ensues. Anger leads to violence. The best way to get to see the boobies is to murder a woman character and strip her of clothes. Oh the humanity! That’s right, in this game you have to find a woman, kill her, and then strip her of all clothes just to see her naked. Now all you “games lead to real life violence” people can start crying about it. Yes, your kids are ritualistically killing women in a video game to see their naked corpses. Sounds pleasant?

I am certainly laughing. I will be keeping count of how many nerds go crazy and start killing women to see them naked in the real world after playing Oblivion. In the meantime let me continue my nude killing spree.

This problem has been nagging my computer for a couple years now. The most frustrating part is that it comes and goes, seemingly on a whim, and my efforts to kill it for good never work. Judging by the large amount of talk on the issue, lots of other people are having the same problem.

Symptoms

Viewing a folder in windows explorer with thumbnail previews turned on produces an error, crash, or illegal operation. Sometimes this is called a DEP (Data Execution Protection) error if Windows and your processor has that functionality. However, I have experienced DEP errors, illegal operations, as well as strange “unskinned” errors (like a low tech error box that does not do anything but put up an error, as explorer and the videos remain).

Solutions Tried and Failed

My first problem was Illegal Operations that caused Explorer to shut down. Now, if I remember correctly the first solution I tried was downloading updates to all my video codecs in the form of a codec pack. BAD IDEA. This made things much, much worse because the codecs started conflicting with each other. Remember the golden rule of codecs.

With codecs, less is more. Install only when you absolutely have to.

Frustrated, I turned to piracy. I had read people were having success with the Divx (at the time I had narrowed it down to a Divx problem) Pro versions. These are not free. So I downloaded the Divx that people recommended and for a while everything worked fine.

Suddenly, one day out of the blue, DEP errors galore. Opening any folder with videos. Thumbnails or clicking on the file and having it previewed in the left pane. DEP errors are more fun because you can drag the stupid things down to the taskbar and hide them away and they won’t even stop you from seeing the previews, thumbnails, or playing the movies most of the time. Needless to say, it was a major annoyance because once you click OK, explorer disappears and it mangles your taskbar, etc.

Reinstalled codecs. Updated codecs. Downloaded new codecs. Nothing worked. People on the boards all over the place felt my pain. One person had said the only thing that fixed it for him was downloading and installing ffdshow. This is a program to increase video fidelity by using post processing, but also has its own codecs. This worked, for a while.

This takes me to last week. I had to uninstall ffdshow because it was conflicting with a game, for one, and it was causing some weird things to happen in Zoom Player. Everything was fine with it gone for a while. Then I start getting weird errors that are “unskinned” and low tech like they were from Windows 95, just a textbox with gibberish and an OK. The errors don’t close anything down or limit what I do, they are majorly annoying because each video seemed to pop up 4 errors one after the other.

The Final Solution

At this point, I’m pissed, and I’m not going to take it anymore. I found the fix to unregister the dll that allows you to have video thumbnails, but this solution is unacceptable to me. A sacrifice in functionality is alright for some, but not me. I want to solve this thing.

I finally found someone who had a nice workaround. I knew it had to do with Divx and Xvid, and I had since removed all the Divx things from my computer and just used Xvid. I also cleaned off all the extra codecs I could. This is directly from Ogros at Digital Digest.

Download the latest build from www.koepi.org or wherever remove any previous installs of xvid then close all unnecessary applications start the install eg(with Koepi’s when it asks for language DO NOT PROCEED YET hit Ctrl+Alt+Del end task “explorer” then continue install WHEN FINISHED go back to task manager select “file” then “new task” type in “explorer” and you should be good to go.

the reason unistalling then reinstalling xvid doesn’t work very well is explorer will hold the xvid.ax in cache and even if you uninstall and reboot explorer will continue to load the old xvid.ax although running the installation when explorer is closed did update the “xvid.ax” to one which doe not conflict with media player 9.

Hopefully this works for you.

This worked for me. Hopefully it stays that way.

I finally decided to get a new video card because I went to play Oblivion (which is a pretty good game incidentally, after I didn’t like Morrowind). As has been stated in multiple reviews, Oblivion pretty much is the nail in the coffin for the Radeon 9700 and 9800 pro. Besides, I have an LCD monitor and playing all the new games in different resolutions than 1600×1200, which is the native of my LCD, sucked.

Unfortunately for me, my computer is quickly becoming a box of dead ends. The socket for my CPU is no longer developed (early AMD 64 socket), my hard drives are not SATA, and my graphics system is AGP. Of course AGP is being replaced by PCI-express, and both ATI and Nvidia have said they will not actively develop any more AGP cards. The last AGP card to hit the market is the Nvidia 7800 GS, and most said it was too expensive, but prices have dropped and unless you upgrade your entire computer this is the best bet to hold you over for another year or so. So I went for it.

I got the eVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO Superclocked edition, being the fastest 7800 GS card on the market. Since I had an All In Wonder 9700 Pro before, I needed that TV tuner that I was accustomed to so I ended up ordering an ATI TV Wonder Elite because it is supposed to have great picture quality. This is where ATI drops the ball.

With the 9700 Pro AIW, it came bundled with the ATI Multimedia Center, which has its flaws, but overall has some nice features and was integrated and nicely packaged. However, it seems over the past year or two every release of the MMC has gotten worse. No matter, I thought, Im sure this fairly expensive TV tuner card had some nice software in it to actually watch TV on my PC.

Quite frankly the ATI TV Wonder Elite has the shittiest software I have ever seen bundled with hardware. Seriously, you can barely even watch TV on your PC with the scaled down, terrible piece of junk that is Cyberlinks PowerCinema 3.0 ATI Version. It is a step down from MMC circa 5 years ago. It didn’t even have a program guide when it was first released, and to fix that ATI simply bundled their Guide Plus+ program (that came with the AIW cards) later. By bundled I don’t mean integrated to make it a seamless product, I mean simply gave us Guide Plus+ to install with no connection what so ever to the TV. So I decided to uninstall that crap.

I went to the newest MMC, even though I thought it was a step backward from the last version. Besides, version 9.13 was the only one that apparently worked with the TV Wonder Elite. So I install it. First of all, you lose some features that you had in the previous MMC version (such as video soap). It is slower. It is bulkier. It makes your hard drive spin like its dying (time shifting is ALWAYS on, with NO WAY to turn it off). So its constantly copying TV to your hard drive and this slows down your TV, especially if you have any other program running. The guide through Guide Plus+ also apparently broke with 9.13 so that TV is no longer preview-able in the Guide window. This disconnects the guide with TV once again. Inexcusable.

Exhausting through the ATI line. I went commercial. I tried BeyondTV. This is alright I guess. Hmm, the guide isn’t working. What’s this? My hard drive is going crazy. Time shifting … great. A quick google, you cannot turn it off. Wonderful. Next!

SageTV is nice. It is also 80 bucks. Ouch. Again, I don’t think you can turn off time shifting. I don’t care about pausing live TV. Stop killing my hard drive, let me turn the stupid thing off.

ChrisTV. Wow this isn’t bad. Its a little cluttered, but there are many power user functions to clean up the image. It’s 50 bucks. Blah. There is no guide to speak of. The author says he is making a new version and you have to buy it when it comes out (no free upgrade). Not going to pay for a product at the virtual end of its life cycle. No thanks.

Cyberlink PowerCinema 4 is the full edition to the crap that ATI gave me. No guide offered AT ALL to USA users … what are they smoking?

So now that all the commercial applications are done, I moved on to open source freeware. The first I tried was GB-PVR. It didn’t seem to have the support for the hardware functionality of my card. I also have some trouble setting it up. I uninstalled it.

The final one is MediaPortal. I didn’t have much trouble setting it up, and it is actively being developed. Running it is another story. The configuration program sometimes hangs and does not shut down, ditto for the actual program. It does not work when you try to make it fullscreen from windowed mode. It has numerous bugs for me. For some reason it will not show some channels that I receive fine in other programs. The guide, while integrated, is a pain to set up (with xmltv) and I still haven’t gotten the times to show up correctly.

All in all I can thank ATI for all of this trouble that still hasn’t been sorted out. Why sell a product with some really crappy software and leave your customers hanging and looking for another solution? Oh wait, this is the company that releases buggier drivers every single release that get worse and worse. No wonder I switched to Nvidia.

On the bright side I do love my new video card. Nvidia also has a nice feature for LCD screens to make the graphics card adapt to a smaller resolution that looks nicer than when the LCD itself does it, and it also allows you to play in a lower resolution with a “box” around the area you aren’t using (like a letterbox) that does not degrade the quality. Nice.

Anyone know of any good TV solutions for the PC? I would love to know.