VIA EPIA MII motherboard

[brit_sage]

Hello readers, this is a post concerning VIAs EPIA MII motherboard.
I am having considerable amounts of trouble with video playback using sage on it.
The system is set up with a VIA EPIA MII motherboard, 1gig of RAM, windows XP (with the latest updates and service packs) and the latest .NET, Java and sage updates.
Basically when I playback certain movies I get astonishing amount of stutter. Yet if I change DXVA MPEG modes between default, A, B, C and D then it allows the other movies that were stuttering to play fine, but then resulting in disturbing those that were fine.
I was wondering if anyone else has a similar setup and found the same problems whether you could shed some light on the matter that could help me.

Thank you for your time,

Rob

[Wheemer]

apparently the windvd 4 (possibly newer) decoder works well with the via epia, from what I recall... What decoder are you currently using?

[brit_sage]

I'm using the default decoder at the moment.

[Wheemer]

Actually maybe it's powerdvd 4 I was thinking of... You'll need to download and install it using overlay in sage. You should also insure hardware acceleration is enabled.

EDIT: it might work with Powerdvd 6 too...

[brit_sage]

Ok great, I have powerdvd 5 & 6 so I will give it a whirl. Thanks alot.

[Menehune]

First, turn off video accelleration in sage. The Sage "accelleration" setting is for VMP9 acceleration which Via's onboard video does not support.

Only overlay will work, IIRC. I tried many settings and most of them stuttered badly and in many cases, locked Sage.

Are you using Sage or Sage client? I'm using Sage client to connect my EPIA box to my server and while playing back a video on a 800x600 desktop thru the TV output, my CPU usage is between 65-85%. If you are trying to use the regular Sage, there is not much CPU left to do anything else like IR.

How much memory do you have? My machine has 512MB and win2000 and it's playback is OK. The menu is slow to appear and sometme the commands (pause, FF, REW) take a while to go thru (typically .5 to 1 sec, rarely 3 seconds), but the video is clean with no jerkyness.

Edit:
I'll check the exact settings I'm using tonite when I get home from work.

[Menehune]

The current settings I use for my Via Epia-M are:

Power DVD 5.0- hardware aceleration "on"

Sage client 2.2.7
Video Renderer: overlay
Mpeg2: Cyberlink Video SP Decoder
DXVA Mpeg mode: Default
DXVA: deinterlacing
Dscaling filter: disabled

DVD Drive: Yes
DVD video renderer: Overlay

[brit_sage]

Excellent thank you very much, I will try these settings when I get home later and let you know how I got on.

I'm using sage client like you and 1GB of RAM.

Thanks once again and will speak to you later.

Rob