Chunky performance in SageTV

[maleitch]

Sorry for the long post, but I promise there is a point. I just want to give all of you as much information up front as I can.

Hey everyone. I am attempting to get into the HTPC scene, but I am having a harder time of of it that I thought. So I purchased a Hauppauge PVR 150 card and thought I would be good to go. Now if there is any aspect of this I am doing totally wrong, remember that I have no clue what I am doing.

Simply to test the card I placed it in an older system that I had. Here are the specs:

AMD Athalon 1800
512 MB RAM
SOYO Dragon Ultra motherboard (VIA chipset)
Nvidia Geforce 4200 AGP video card
Windows XP Pro

I have basic cable, and I was testing this using a very low end CRT television using the S-Video out on the Nvidia video card.

I first tested the card using the included WinTV software that came with the card. I didn't get any picture using the WinTV software at first. I then updated the VIA chipset drivers and then it started working.

I am using the Nvidia NView software to have dual displays and one big desktop between a 17" monitor and the tv I mentioned above. The WinTV software displayed the TV "ok" on the monitor AND the TV, however the picture quality was no where close to what I normally see on the TV when the cable runs directly.

Not being thrilled with picture quality I thought maybe it was the software, so I downloaded a demo of SageTV. The software seems great and I was really excited about it...until I actually tried it on the TV.

So remember, I have a shared desktop between the computer monitor and the TV. First I noticed that when I used the SageTV on the TV side of things the response was amazingly SLOW. I would click on an option with the mouse...wait several seconds...then it would take. Thinking that this was supposed to be how it worked I just went ahead and recorded something. I then played the recording back and it was like watching a slide show. The audio of the show was absolutely perfect, HOWEVER it seemed like the video was showing one frame every few seconds. Seriously the best whay I can describe is as a slide show. There was no motion or anything.

Finally I dragged the SageTV app back over to the computer monitor and it worked flawlessly. The menu was very responsive and the video playback was just as I expected it to be.

So it does appear to be an issue with the TV, but does it have to do with the way I have the Nview software setup or the way SageTV is setup.

I would appreciate anyone's advice on this and any other setup tips you might have.

[Wheemer]

Because of directx limitations sage has to be run on the primary monitor when using vmr9 rendering. Just set your tv to primary.

[heffe2001]

First thing I would do would be to ditch this: Nvidia Geforce 4200 AGP video card

Get a card with more horsepower if you want to use dual screens. I use a 5600 in one machine, and a 5900 in another, and my main desktop uses a 6800 PCI-E, which seems to run dual displays (a 17" LCD & a 15" LCD currently) without any problems.

I've got an old 4200 around here somewhere that I might try on one of my systems (depends on if I have time this weekend). I'm going to say though it's a horsepower problem with your video card. You could also set your TV as the primary display, and your 17" as secondary and most likely have good results on TV quality.