Windows XP MCE, Closed Captions, and Angel tuners

I purchased a Dell Dimension E510 with Windows XP Media Center Edition sporting dual tuners. I ordered it and within two days it was on my door stop. Cool.

After a few days of use, my biggest problem that I have had is that recorded content's closed captioning was out of sync (about two to three seconds before) the audio. This problem doesn't occur with Live TV - only recorded TV.

For someone like me, it's pretty much unwatchable like this. There appear to be many other folks who have reported similar problems with no clear solutions. But, that wasn't about to stop me...

After several hours of searching and tweaking (including switching from the bundled CyberDVD decoder to NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder - yes, NVIDIA's code does work with Dell's Intel video card; not sure if I'll pay for it yet), I finally stumbled upon the driver page for the bundled Emuzed Angel MPEG card.

I updated the driver from 1.0.2.34 (as provided by Dell) to 1.0.2.36 and restarted the machine.

So far, the captions on newly recorded content now appear to be in sync. (Of course, the content I previously recorded is still out of sync.)

Note that I have not had time to try out their beta driver yet.

But, I'm crossing my fingers that the closed captioning problem is fixed.

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