How I Got my Dell Latitude CPX J750 Working as a Client Machine

[Skiier__Dude]

Hey all,

New to the forums here and I thought I would make a first post oulining how I got the Sage Client working on an old laptop connected to the TV in the kitchen.

Background: Laptop is an older Dell CPX J750. It has a Pentium III processor with a maximum CPU speed of 750Mhz. It supports Intel's Speedstep technology. It has 384Mb of RAM (max 512) and the ATI Rage Mobility video processor with S-Video out connected to an SDTV. 10/100 PCI NIC connected to my home network. Operating system: XP Professional SP2. FWIW: Server is an AMD Athalon 1200+ running XP Pro, a Hauppage PVR 150, with 384Mb of RAM.

Prior to investigating and making the changes below, video would not get piped out the built-in S-Video output. Then once it did, live TV would be very choppy, audio and video was out of sync at anything greater than "Fair" quality settings (.9Gbps/hr) -- oh and the CPU was pegged to pretty much 100%. The choppy video was only a problem on the laptop as my main home PC would run the video quite well (its only a Celeron 1000 (overclocked to 1152) with 512Mb RAM.

Here are the things I needed to do to get this guy working properly:

1. Install latest ATI drivers from here:
http://support.packardbell-europe.co...20600.asp?c=ap
-- I have found that unfortunately the latest Omega ATI drivers do not work properly. The Omega desktop is incompatible with the system board and the drivers will not load. These ATI drivers work very well for me. They allow you to output the video to the S-Video port (the standard Windows XP driver does not allow this feature unfortunately). Follow the instructions within the README file. Once installed, you can switch between the laptop screen and TV monitor using the ATI Desktop. I have created shortcut keys by pressing CTRL+ALT+T (for TV) and CTRL+ALT+L (for laptop).

-- also, optimized the laptop for "Best Performance" within XP.
Start>Control Panel>System>Advanced>Performance -- click Optimize for Best Performance button and then restart system.

2. Install ffdshow from here:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm
-- I have found that ffdshow significantly decreases CPU utilization. I have used the latest version 2005-12-08 as the support for MPEG-2 decoding has been fixed.

3. Configure ffdshow:
-- There is a good guide here:
http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=ffdshowdvd_4
-- It's handy to active the OSD within ffdshow so that you can monitor CPU utilization on the fly. Currently I am playing around with ffdshow just with a basic setting. I am using the libavcodec (Codecs>MPEG2) and am currently not running any filters.

4. Configure SageTV Client Codec:
-- Setup > Detailed Settings > Video/Audio
-- I have set Video Renderer to Overlay
-- I have set MPEG2 Video Decoder Filter to ffdshow

5. Configure SageTV Recording Quality:
-- Setup > Detailed Settings > Multimedia
-- I have set Record Quality to Good -- Great is obviously -- better.

So that pretty much sums up the changes I have made.

The results: video and audio run smoothly now with no clipping or choppy frames. CPU utilization is now down to roughly 65-70% while a video is running with the quality set to Good.

I'd be interested in suggestions for optimizing ffdshow -- what filters etc... can improve the picture quality but not kill the processor. Any takers?