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SageTV Software Discussion related to the SageTV application produced by SageTV. Questions, issues, problems, suggestions, etc. relating to the SageTV software application should be posted here. (Check the descriptions of the other forums; all hardware related questions go in the Hardware Support forum, etc. And, post in the customizations forum instead if any customizations are active.)

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  #1  
Old 11-15-2005, 04:52 AM
innervision innervision is offline
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Why is SageTV so resource hungry?

I am using an AverTV Studio tuner card on a 1.67Ghz Athlon XP 2100+ with 1Gb ram and a Radeon 9200 vid card. I'm using full software decoding, and the recording (on any quality setting) is very choppy if i'm watching live tv. If I try to click my mouse for the menu, it can take up to 10 seconds to respond before I can wait another 10sec to get the selection over to my cursor, then more time for the action to take effect.

SageTV is using about 70-100% of my processor, which basically makes it unuseable.

I've never come across any other software that had any sort of problem with watching tv while recording at the same time, and even using the PC for other things, even at very high quality recordings.

What gives?
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  #2  
Old 11-15-2005, 07:24 AM
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gplasky gplasky is offline
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Is that a HDTV card? If it is that is why you're having issues. Athlon XP2100+ (1.67GHz) isn't enough horsepower for watching HDTV.

Gerry
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  #3  
Old 11-15-2005, 03:56 PM
innervision innervision is offline
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Nope. It's an old regular tv tuner based on bt8x8.
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  #4  
Old 11-15-2005, 03:58 PM
JasonJoel JasonJoel is offline
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Ah, software encoder... Beats me.

I never had real reliable success in ANY software with software encoders. Although I will say that some were better than others. I have no idea how well (or not) Sage works with software tuners.

If you do ANY amount of TV recording I would highly suggest shelling out $75 for a hardware encoding TV card. Worth every penny.

Jason
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  #5  
Old 11-15-2005, 04:32 PM
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stanger89 stanger89 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by innervision
Nope. It's an old regular tv tuner based on bt8x8.
That's why, software encoding is a lot of work.
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  #6  
Old 11-15-2005, 07:34 PM
innervision innervision is offline
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That's not why. I have absolutely no troubles at all recording and watching with other software, ie., WinDVR, BeyondTV, and basically any other.
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  #7  
Old 11-15-2005, 09:14 PM
blade blade is offline
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If you only get choppy recordings when playing video as it records, then it sounds like the strain of playback is causing your software capture card to choke. Maybe try different settings or decoders while watching previously recorded shows until you get your cpu usage down to acceptable levels? What is your cpu usage when you're recording and not watching a video?

I definetly wouldn't say Sage is a resource hog. I have 4 hardware tuners in an old celeron 366 with 320 mb's of ram and have no problems with my recordings. My cpu usage is less than 5% when recording 4 shows and playing another one back on my client box.

For my client I have an XP 3000 with 1 gig of ram and a 6600GT and cpu usage is only around 20-30% during playback at 720p.
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  #8  
Old 11-15-2005, 11:57 PM
innervision innervision is offline
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Of course you wouldn't say it's a resource hog if you're using hardware encoding, but for full software enc/decoding it's subpar.

In SageTV recording in standby mode uses ~50-60% of my processor.
If i'm recording and watching at the same time the processor demand goes up to ~90-98% and sometimes 100%.

These values are not my total CPU usage, but SageTV's only.

With WinDVR, when I watch tv it uses ~2-6% CPU, and when I record and watch, it uses ~50-60% of my CPU. HUGE difference from sage.

I tried all of the encoding/decoding codecs available including sage, intervideo, mainconcept, and another I can't think of. I tried using overlay and vmr9, but it's about the same no matter what.
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  #9  
Old 11-16-2005, 05:49 AM
blade blade is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by innervision
In SageTV recording in standby mode uses ~50-60% of my processor.........

With WinDVR, when I watch tv it uses ~2-6% CPU, and when I record and watch, it uses ~50-60% of my CPU.
If you're cpu usage is really only 2-6% for playback then you're looking at 44-54% cpu usage for capture at the very least for WinDVR. That's not much different than what you're seeing in Sage. When you add in the cpu usage for playback in Sage it can easily reach +70% usage.

Either way software encoding is a very poor choice for a PVR. There's no way you're going to be able to run multiple tuners because the cpu usage for capture is so high.

Last edited by blade; 11-16-2005 at 05:55 AM.
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  #10  
Old 11-16-2005, 07:03 AM
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salsbst salsbst is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by innervision
Of course you wouldn't say it's a resource hog if you're using hardware encoding, but for full software enc/decoding it's subpar.

In SageTV recording in standby mode uses ~50-60% of my processor.
If i'm recording and watching at the same time the processor demand goes up to ~90-98% and sometimes 100%.

These values are not my total CPU usage, but SageTV's only.

With WinDVR, when I watch tv it uses ~2-6% CPU, and when I record and watch, it uses ~50-60% of my CPU. HUGE difference from sage.

I tried all of the encoding/decoding codecs available including sage, intervideo, mainconcept, and another I can't think of. I tried using overlay and vmr9, but it's about the same no matter what.
That's because WinDVR shows you truly live TV (and thus is not encoding the live tv stream). Sage is recording everything, even live tv, thus it's trying to do two encoding jobs simultaneously.

Most people who use Sage use hardware encoders. A few people complained that software encoding wasn't supported, and so the company built in software encoding.

Now, people complain that Sage uses too many resources.

Tough crowd!
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  #11  
Old 11-16-2005, 05:41 PM
innervision innervision is offline
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Actually when I set the capture Quality very low in WinDVR and watch almost-live tv in timeshifting, the quality I see is bad, but when I set the capture quality to high, there isn't much difference when watching the live tv. So it is doing encoding and decoding simultaneously.

I think Frey needs to work on the software more to make it more efficient before I would even consider upgrading from the trial. I just love the style of the guide so much that I wanted to find out if I was doing something wrong and fix it, but apparently Frey is. It's just too expensive for me right now to go out and buy a decent hardware encoding tuner and SageTV just to get things rolling.
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  #12  
Old 11-16-2005, 05:45 PM
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stanger89 stanger89 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by innervision
Actually when I set the capture Quality very low in WinDVR and watch almost-live tv in timeshifting, the quality I see is bad, but when I set the capture quality to high, there isn't much difference when watching the live tv. So it is doing encoding and decoding simultaneously.
But what sort of CPU usage do you get when timeshifting, certainly not 2-4%. Oh, and sorry about the snippy comment earlier, many/most of us gave up on software encoding long ago because it's rediculously resourse intensive.
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  #13  
Old 11-16-2005, 11:57 PM
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Ryokurin Ryokurin is offline
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what codec are you using for playback and does it support hardware acceleration? if its all software then your computer has to capture that stream and process the display at the same time. if it supports hardware acceleration then at least the video card will take care of most of the display processing.
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  #14  
Old 11-21-2005, 03:24 PM
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Commodore 64 Commodore 64 is offline
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I'm sorry but the fact of the matter is this: You need a hardware capture card. Period. They shouldn't be prohibitively expensive especially used.

I'm not a big fan of Ebay, but you could try a smaller, tighter trading community like the Agora at Arstechnica. It's very well moderated and they maintain a good system of references at www.beerology.com.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...frm/f/57909216

Last edited by Commodore 64; 11-22-2005 at 08:20 AM.
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